Imperial's first fully open access book is now available.

The Library's Scholarly Communications Management team has recently worked with an Imperial researcher, Professor Michael Ruzhansky, to enable the open access publication of his most recent book, Quantization on Nilpotent Lie Groups. This is Imperial's first fully open access book title, and is a first for Professor Ruzhansky's publisher, Birkhauser, as well. It means that to read the book, you do not need to purchase it, or wait for a library copy to be available.

Michael wanted to publish his book in this way because "open access contributes greatly to the spread of the research findings among experts and students alike. This is especially interesting in the case of books compared to papers; while most (leading) institutions have subscriptions to main journals and, therefore, get access to research papers once they are published with or without open access. In the case of books it is not so automatic and in my experience access to pdf files of books often have to be purchased separately. Publishing research books open access eliminates this obstacle."

To publish the book on open access, Library Services paid an open access fee from the Imperial Open Access Fund available to all researchers at the College. If you want to know whether your publisher will publish your work on open access, look at their author information pages, or get in touch with your journal editor. Please note that the HEFCE post-2014 REF open access policy now applies to all journal articles and conference proceeedings accepted for publication since 1 April 2016. You can also deposit your work in Spiral, the College's open access repository, at no cost.

For more information about how Library Services supports open access publishing, visit Scholarly Communication.