“University Press of Florida is delighted to be among the first presses to join University Press Scholarship Online. In today’s constantly changing environment, we know how important it is to work hand-in-glove with academic libraries to make the most up-to-date and rigorously vetted content available to as wide an audience as possible. Through UPSO and its enhanced searchability functions, we anticipate both an increased readership—especially of portions of books—and a resulting improvement in future scholarship,” says Dennis Lloyd, Associate Director/Director of Sales and Marketing, University Press of Florida.

UPSO brings together the best of scholarly publishing from around the world with the same cutting-edge search and discovery functionality that has marked the success of Oxford Scholarship Online to a greatly expanded subject base. “Fordham University Press is delighted to be able to offer libraries electronic access to its books through Oxford’s UPSO service. We are fortunate to be associated with such a well-respected and proven platform that offers our content in XML as part of a dynamic search database. I have been impressed with the knowledge of the entire Oxford team from the technological whizzes doing the back-end preparation to the dedicated sales reps selling to libraries. I look forward to continued success,” says Fredric Nachbaur, Director, Fordham University Press.

“The University Press of Kentucky is thrilled about its inclusion as part of the University Press Scholarship Online program. As one of the leaders in the academic community, Oxford is known for being one of the top providers of electronic and print content. With XML tagging and dynamic searchable information, UPSO is clearly a paragon of the digital publishing age,” says John P. Hussey, Director of Marketing & Sales, University Press of Kentucky.

“This is a great opportunity for the digitization and discoverability of Fordham University Press program”, said Fredric Nachbaur, Director of Fordham University Press.  “Academics, students, and librarians will be able to access and reference Fordham titles on a platform that has become recognized and used in over 750 libraries and institutions worldwide.”

Niko Pfund, President of Oxford University Press, Inc. noted, “Fordham, like Oxford, shares the responsibility and mission to disseminate scholarship.  This partnership is a means for both publishers to provide access to research and scholarship to an ever-widening network of libraries, and the academy of scholars and students worldwide.”

Fordham Scholarship Online is a pilot program for University Press Scholarship Online, a platform that will aggregate content across participating University Presses and is scheduled to launch in September 2011. The UPSO platform allows for homepage and content branding to be identifiable to each participating press, while delivering highly intuitive tools to deep search across all of the content within the program.  “Our hope is that, by gathering university press content under a single umbrella, UPSO will offer librarians, scholars, and presses alike a simple, sensible solution, one informed by library-press cooperation, decades of online publishing experience, and a flexible partnership mentality,” Pfund said.

Benefits of Fordham Scholarship Online for scholars and libraries:

• First time that Fordham University Press content will be made available in XML as part of a dynamic search database
• Aids cross-disciplinary research with three subject modules at launch in history, philosophy, and religion
• Helps save research time with over 130 fully cross-referenced and cross-searchable titles, with clickable citations from bibliographies and footnotes, including OpenURL and DOI-linking support, and more
• Allows users to streamline research through a single online platform
• Consistent and timely updates keep the pace with physical book publishing and provide a reliable schedule for new content
• Enables libraries to reduce subscriptions to multiple smaller websites
• Can be easily integrated into library systems and updated frequently with new content
• Offers full customer support services as well as flexibility and choice in institutional purchasing models

From within these pages, you will have access to the latest information on partner presses, development of new subject modules, platform functionality, project announcements leading up to launch, and more. We hope that you bookmark this site and explore the pages to find out how UPSO can benefit you, your research and library collections worldwide.

“The expansion of Oxford Scholarship Online,” notes Tim Barton, Managing Director of Global Academic Business for Oxford University Press, “to include the research and scholarship of other university presses, creating a single platform searchable across many high-quality programs, represents a step forward in ensuring that academic content is increasingly accessible—and conveniently so.”

Responding to increased demand for online scholarly content, UPSO streamlines the research process by making disparately published monographs easily accessible, highly discoverable and fully cross-searchable via one online platform. Research that previously would have required users to jump between a variety of books, and disconnected websites can now be concentrated through a single search engine. UPSO creates an individually-branded home for monographs from each participating university press just as it has done for Oxford Scholarship Online while allowing highly intuitive tools to deep search across all the content in the program. As such, UPSO will be the premier online research tool—for scholars, teachers, graduate and undergraduate students—and an essential resource for all academic libraries.

Oxford Scholarship Online was launched in 2003 and immediately hailed as “A superior e-book implementation” by Booklist, and “For ease of use, user-friendly design, and quality texts, Oxford Scholarship Online is among the best I have ever used” by Library Journal.  The only publisher with more than eight years of direct experience offering an academic monograph publishing model, OUP has developed a nuanced and highly successful service specifically developed to address digital monographs subscribed to by over 750 libraries and institutions of higher learning. The UPSO program builds on this experience to the benefit of the university press community, as well as librarians and users who understand the growing power provided by a post-PDF research solution.

Benefits of UPSO for academics, libraries, and partner presses:

• provides the highest quality scholarly content in all subject areas
• is fully cross-referenced and cross-searchable, with clickable citations from bibliographies and footnotes, including OpenURL and DOI-linking support, and more
• allows users to streamline research through a single online platform
• enables libraries to reduce subscriptions to multiple smaller websites
• can be easily integrated into library systems and updated frequently with new content
• offers full customer support services as well as flexibility and choice in purchasing models
• increase discoverability and usage of university press scholarly materials
• offers university presses unique opportunity to create an XML digital workflow and join a highly successful online scholarship platform, reaching the global academic market at low distribution costs

“We are very excited about the redevelopment of OSO and the opportunity to open up the platform to other presses,” said Casper Grathwohl, VP, Digital Publisher at Oxford University Press.  “I think the timing is right—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 in an environment that is more flexible than most other offerings that are becoming available. Although the program provides all the links to other academic content needed by researchers, UPSO is really about unlocking the power of the academic monograph, and that singular focus makes it incredibly compelling. I believe it will make a significant contribution to the development of the monograph in its next phase of life.”

A pilot program with Fordham University Press is launching in March 2011, and OUP is in talks with a number of university presses for a full launch in Fall 2011.