Will I Be Charged for Publishing?

punctum is one of the very few Open Access (OA) presses in the world that does not charge what are known as Book Processing Charges (BPCs), because we feel they are inherently anti-democratic and exacerbate the historic inequities of academic publishing, yet they are fast becoming the standard protocol for an increasingly capitalized and neoliberal Open Access publishing. If you are curious to know more about how much it costs to create an academic book and the wide variations of BPCs, see Frances Pinter's “Why Book Processing Charges (BPCs) Vary So Much.”

Fees will never be a requirement for publication, now and in the future, and we don't raise the issue of possible funding sources until after we have made a decision to publish any given manuscript. Our decision to publish any authors’ or editors’ work is solely based on the merits of the ideas and writing, and if a project excites us and is well executed and given a thumbs-up during our review process, we are going to publish it no matter what.

At the same time, authors who have access to financial support for open access books, from whatever channel, help us to publish even more books than we normally would be able to, and on behalf of authors who have no access to any funding whatsoever. However, since punctum’s operations are mainly funded by supporting research libraries, one of the best things that our authors can do is to bring our Supporting Library Membership Program to the attention of Scholarly Communications librarians and Acquisitions librarians at their institutions, and tell them you’re a punctum author and would like to see us supported by your library.