In 2003, Oxford University Press launched Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO), a groundbreaking online platform for the press’s monograph content. Now, after more than a year of discussions with potential partners, it’s ready to share the successful platform, with the official launch of University Press Scholarship Online (UPSO). With UPSO, other university presses from around the world can now offer their own individually-branded monograph repositories, powered by the OSO platform.
The first phase of UPSO includes Fordham University Press (Fordham Scholarship Online/FSO); The American University in Cairo Press (Cairo Scholarship Online/CSO); The University Press of Kentucky (Kentucky Scholarship Online/KSO); University Press of Florida (Florida Scholarship Online/FLASO); Hong Kong University Press (Hong Kong Scholarship Online/HKSO). Edinburgh University Press (Edinburgh Scholarship Online/ESO) and Policy Press (Policy Press Scholarship Online/PPSO) are slated for March 2012. And, OUP officials say, additional presses are in talks to participate.
“UPSO is ultimately about unlocking the power of the academic monograph,” said OUP’s Casper Grathwohl, v-p, digital publisher, in a statement. "Over the past year, the university press community has delved more deeply into strategic conversations about how to address their digital monograph publishing and we hope that the UPSO program will offer them a solution with a proven track record.".
Indeed, UPSO is part of a growing field of platform competitors wooing university press monograph content, including nascent efforts by The University Press E-Book Consortium (UPeC), which recently merged with Project Muse Editions, and Books at JSTOR, an extension of the popular non-profit e-journal platform.
But OUP officials like their position in that brewing competition, with a product that has proven successful and is already well-known in the academic community. “We’re the only publisher with a decade of this digital experience under our belt,” Grathwohl notes, adding that more than 60% of research libraries now offer access to Oxford Scholarship online. All UPSO content is available in XML, (as well as available to download as PDF), and is fully cross-referenced and cross-searchable, with "clickable citations" from bibliographies and footnotes, including OpenURL and DOI-linking support. Mobile functionality will be available later this year.
