Amherst College Introduces Open-Access Press for the Liberal Arts

Amherst College’s new digital-publishing effort, announced on Wednesday and known as Amherst College Press, will publish peer-reviewed contributions from scholars working in a small range of liberal-arts disciplines. The college plans to hire a director and two editors to run the new operation, which will be housed in the college’s library and will produce books in formats common to most e-readers. The venture will not focus on print production or distribution, and all publications will include Creative Commons licenses, according to the college’s announcement. “Current models of scholarly publishing do far more to lock down information than to disseminate it to those who need it,” said Bryn Geffert, librarian of the college, in a news release. “We aim to change that.”