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OU Libraries Monthly Feature: Profiles in Open Featuring OU Press

Book cover image of La Castañeda Insane Asylumn and subtitle Narratives of Pain in Modern Mexico by author Cristina Rivera Garza. It features a white background black text, a bright red stripe across the top, and a black and white photo. At the bottom in black test is : University of Oklahoma Press.
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“Profiles in Open” regularly features OU scholars who advocate for open access and make their work openly accessible, benefitting authors, readers, funders, the public, and others. Check out this month’s profile of OU Press.

OU Press is the publishing branch of the University of Oklahoma and is a leading publisher in areas including the American West and Native American history and culture, as well as disciplines ranging from classical studies to environmental history to ancient languages.

In September 2020, OU Press published its first open monograph, La Castañeda Insane Asylum: Narratives of Pain in Modern Mexico. Written by Cristina Rivera Garza, a fiction writer and recipient of the 2020 MacArthur Foundation Genius fellowship, and translated by Laura Kanost, La Castañeda Insane Asylum delivers the first inside look at Mexico’s La Castañeda General Insane Asylum, a public mental health institution that opened just prior to the start of the Mexican Revolution.

The monograph was published as part of the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot (SHMP). With financial support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the SHMP produces open access digital versions of high-quality, peer-reviewed monographs in the field of history from a variety of leading university presses. Along with TOME, the SHMP is one of a series of open access publishing initiatives that OU Press currently participates in. OU Press Director Dale Bennie states, “The University of Oklahoma Press is committed to the highest caliber of research-based scholarship designed to cultivate and disseminate knowledge as widely as possible at an affordable cost. We believe that the most viable way to disseminate scholarship more widely is to create an ecosystem that supports all stakeholders: researchers and scholars, authors, publishers, libraries, and readers. The range of needs across these participants requires a sensible and diverse approach to sustaining the production of knowledge. We will always be willing to participate in innovative programs that are working to develop sustainable models for open access publications."

Recently, OU Press has found a home in SHAREOK, the joint institutional repository for OU Libraries, Oklahoma State University Libraries, and the University of Central Oklahoma Max Chambers Library. Here, users can access a free digital edition of Rivera Garza’s monograph, a first for OU Press in their efforts working “in the open.”