The University Press: extending UTS’ global impact

Mission

The University Press mission is to support the UTS 2027 vision for the University to be a leading public university of technology recognised for its global impact. To support this endeavour, the Press provides a platform for high quality free scholarship that seeks to help solve our many global challenges. Since its formation in 2003, the Press has emerged with a strong social justice and First Nations presence in its publications as well as publishing in areas including Design, Architecture and Building, Law, History, Information Sciences, Medical Anatomy and the Social Sciences.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Strategy

Removing most financial, technical, legal and cultural barriers to the sharing of open knowledge we freely disseminate high quality peer reviewed scholarly works from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world. To ensure only quality research is published by the Press, we – in partnership with our journal and book editors and others – maintain the standards across our publications required for global indexing as well as membership to peak publishing bodies: COPE, DOAJ and OASPA.  ​​​​​​​

Our OA books are freely available to read, download and share for any user with an internet connection. Most of our books come in various free formats from PDF, ePub, Mobi for Kindle and, since 2020, paid, quality print on demand books from various Lightning Source printing centres around the world.

Our journals are Diamond Open Access meaning, free to publish in with no author facing fees (APCs), free to read, download and reuse via liberal Creative Commons (CC BY) licensing, and free to share by any user in the world with an internet connection on any device. With well over 500,000 downloads annually of around 3,000 journal articles and growing, the reach and readership of the University Press’s journals, and brand, is significant.

Our OERs include the interactive Anatomy Quizbooks 1 and 2, The Human Brain Explained interactive web-book due for publication later this year (2021) and various exciting new OER projects in the pipeline.

Achievements

Excellent partnerships ​​​​​​​

• Global partnerships with publishing specialists, including open access publisher and infrastructure provider Ubiquity Press (UK and USA), book development team Froebe Publishing Group (USA) and Manila Typesetting Company (Philippines), iThenticate, and others, the Press’s publishing infrastructure is well supported, global, efficient and of high quality.

Celebrating Research Reach and Impact

• Shown through the Press’s publications’ download, citation and Altmetric counts – including strong and increasing media uptake of ePRESS published research (view data here).
• Since the launch of the new Press platform in late 2019, our relatively new catalogue of 41 open access books and their chapters have collectively been downloaded over 25,000 times around the world via the UTS ePRESS website and the OAPEN network – in addition to over 8,000 book visits via the Google Play Books platform.
• In 2020, our 3,000 + journal articles were downloaded over 500,000 times and citations are growing strongly as seen in the Dimensions data, with over 7,000 citations across only 2,401 articles.
• We also proudly support undergraduate First Nations UTS students in the publication of their widely read and shared NEW: ESAIS student journal.