Open Access Partnership with CSU Open Press
This year University Press of Colorado established a co-publication arrangement with the Colorado State University Open Press to provide printing, sales & marketing, and order fulfillment for print editions of titles published as Open Access digital titles by the WAC Clearinghouse at CSU. During the course of the fiscal year, we released five new print editions in the Perspective on Writing series and one new title in the Across the Disciplines series as part of this arrangement, and five more co-publications are scheduled for 2017–2018. Click here for a complete list of these titles. Over time, the hope of both UPC and the CSU Open Press is that the WAC Clearinghouse model might expand to other disciplines, and this partnership will provide the infrastructure to make such new ventures thrive.
Hayden's Landscapes Revisited
With generous support from the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, UPC launched its first website publication, Hayden's Landscapes Revisited by UCCS professor of geography and environmental studies, Thomas P. Huber, with maps drawn by Evan Menkhus and Scott Callahan. In 1873, Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden and a team of geologists struck out across the Colorado Territory to map the area’s natural features. From the craggy profile of Longs Peak to the rolling waters of the Colorado River, Hayden’s US Geological Survey expedition sketched and surveyed dozens of the state’s most striking landscapes. In this web publication, Huber uses modern photographic technology to revisit and bring to life the drawings of the Hayden survey, matching sweeping panoramic photographs with the natural landscape features in the stunning pen-and-ink drawings and maps created by the surveyors a century and a half ago. In the accompanying text, Huber explains the significance of each featured landscape and places it in the context of the larger geology and landform history of the area. Publishing a website that was similar to a book but living in the highly networked environment of the internet was an interesting adventure, and no small challenge for our web design team. In fact, they even wrote a blog post, The Book as Website, about the design challenges they faced.
The Enchanted Gem Carvings of Vasily Konovalenko
UPC also launched a new co-publishing partnership with the Denver Museum of Nature & Science this year with our inagural publication, Stories in Stone by Stephen E. Nash with photographs by Richard M. Wicker. The book provides the history behind perhaps the most unique--and quirky--exhibit a visitor might find at DMNS, a room full of spectacular, colorful miniature statues carved from gemstones. The images in the book provide a close up view of details of the carvings not easily viewed with the naked eye, offering an entirely different, enriching perspective on Konovalenko's work. As the Gemological Institute of America notes, the book "is a fitting tribute to Vasily Konovalenko and to his legacy to the Russian tradition of stone carving."
