The University of California Press is partnering with Oxford University Press to launch California Scholarship Online/CALSO on OUP’s recently-launched University Press Scholarship Online (UPSO) platform. UC officials said CALSO is set to launch in March, 2012, with more than 450 titles across four major subject areas: history, classics, biology, and sociology. More titles in religion and anthropology will follow in May, 2012.
UPSO is an expansion of Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO), the press’s groundbreaking online platform for monograph content. Launched earlier this month , UPSO offers university presses from around the world their own individually-branded monograph repositories, powered by the OSO platform. It 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 is scheduled to launch in 2012 with over 14,000 e-books from 66 presses; and, an effort by JSTOR, an extension of the popular non-profit e-journal platform.
With choices available to it, (including the potential to build its own platform, as UC, through its California Digital Library, is a digital leader) the University of California Press partnership stands as a major endorsement of UPSO. 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, OUP officials say. And, the OSO platform, established in 2003, is already well-known, and well-reviewed among academics.
“We know it is critical for libraries to broaden patron access to online scholarly books," said Alison Mudditt, Director of University of California Press. "We are delighted to partner with Oxford in the UPSO initiative, building on their extensive experience in the scholarly digital environment."
The deal brings together two of the world’s largest, and most distinguished, and in some cases, competing, university presses. “I've long been a fan of the University of California Press and its publishing program,” said Niko Pfund, president and Academic publisher for Oxford University Press. “UCP surely ranks by any estimation in the top tier of university presses and I'm delighted to be joining forces with such a dynamic press to expand the reach of its offerings."
