"After fielding enquiries from researchers, our impression is that there are many PhD dissertations, manuscripts, working papers and proceedings with enough content and quality to reach a larger audience than is the case today."

This is Research Librarian Niels Erik Frederiksen explanation of the background for a new initiative that provides researchers with the opportunity to reach a broader audience on the internet.

What is more, it won’t cost the individual researcher anything.

"We can fund a service that individual researchers would not have the chance of paying for. With this service we focus on the publications that would not otherwise be published for financial reasons," says Niels Erik Frederiksen.

The open source platform is named Open Monograph Press and here it is possible for researchers to publish. Like the open source platform Open Journal System, it has been developed by Simon Fraser University and Stanford University.

1 million downloads this year

Many researchers will already be familiar with the Open Journal System platform on which researchers at AU publish 48 different scientific e-journals. That researchers who publish on the internet really have a chance to reach out to a much larger readership is something Niels Erik Frederiksen can document with the latest statistics:

"We had 934,150 downloads of articles from the 48 scientific e-journals last year, and as we had 100,468 downloads in January this year, we will in all probability reach one million downloads in 2015. In that context it is worth noting that many of these journals may not have existed today if they had continued to publish as print-only journals," says Niels Erik Frederiksen.

He continues:

"We receive very positive feedback from the researchers who we help to publish e-journals. So we hope that this will also be the case with the opportunity for publishing e-books."

A single book has so far been published on the new platform, which was published by Associate Professor Olivier Danvy and PhD student Jacob Johannsen from the Department of Computer Science.

Facts

You can find out more about the possibility of publishing your research as an e-book by contacting:

Research Librarian Niels Erik Frederiksen: nef@statsbiblioteket.dk

 Member of technical/administrative staff Jesper Boserup Thestrup: jbt@statsbiblioteket.dk

You can also find out more and read the publication guidelines at: library.au.dk/en/researchers/publish-materials/