Lulu, an independent publisher, announced at the London Book Fair the launch of Glass Tree, an online publishing site dedicated to meeting the needs of academic and scholarly authors and communities.
Glass Tree challenges the traditional academic publishing model by placing academics in complete control of their content, accelerating time to market, providing transparency into the works published, and reversing the revenue model to allow academics to realize 70 percent of the profit from sales of their work.
Glass Tree will provide free tools for book publication, extensive subject matter taxonomies, complimentary promotional tools and free distribution to a global network of online bookstores. Additionally, authors will also have access to an array of competitively priced supplementary services including book editing, translation, peer review and marketing assistance.
Through the use of print-on-demand technology and Lulu's global network of printers, Glass Tree minimises production costs resulting in a high-quality, affordable product that can be printed and delivered anywhere in the world in a matter of days rather than months - regardless of the quantity needed.
Most importantly, authors have the option to control their work. They own their copyrighted material and choose the license under which it is published. The authors determine the publication date, set the retail price and, earn 70% of profits from the sale of their work. When discoveries are made in their field that warrant a new edition, they can choose when to update, revise and republish ensuring content is always up-to-date in the ever-changing academic environment.
Glass Tree will launch in three phases. The first phase encompassing scholarly publishing of books and eBooks will be publicly available in the 3rd quarter of 2016. Publication of conference proceedings and journals will follow.
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