John Morgenstern
Director, Clemson University Press
Clemson University
Yang Wu
Open Resources Librarian
Clemson University
The trend in recent years for university presses to migrate under the umbrella of academic libraries has brought together publishing professionals and affordable-learning advocates seeking to alleviate the ever-mounting burden of rising textbook costs. Clemson University Press, a division of Clemson Libraries, recently established an imprint to publish professional-quality Open Education Resources (OER) in partnership with the Partnership Among South Carolina Academic Libraries (PASCAL), the statewide library consortium. The arrangement is a novel approach to increasing efforts by libraries to develop and distribute online free learning materials tailored to the needs of students in specific states and regions, but it also provides a model for institutions in other localities to emulate. This presentation will focus on the innovative partnership that brought the imprint into fruition and explain how it operates to maximize statewide investments in affordable learning. The example of a federally funded grant to publish three OER written by authors based at institutions across the state will illustrate the imprint’s potential as a platform for further interinstitutional collaboration.