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, “Why Book Processing Charges (BPCs) Vary So Much.”

punctum’s operations are funded by research libraries and we also have a working partnership with UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) Library. 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. One of the best things that our authors can do, however, is to bring our Supporting Library Membership Program to the attention of Scholarly Communications librarians and Acquisitions librarians at their universities, and tell them you’re a punctum author and would like to see us supported by your library. Most of our funding comes from university libraries and very book we publish is a gift from them. Most importantly, fees will never be charged to authors and editors and will never be a requirement for publication, now and in the future, and we will never even 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.