“Founded in 1969, Temple University Press publishes books in the humanities and social sciences and is the premier publisher of books on Philadelphia and the surrounding region. The Press began reporting administratively to Temple’s libraries in 2010. With the 2018 launch of the libraries’ Center for Scholarly Communication and Open Publishing, the libraries and Press began to partner on new approaches to sharing scholarly output and developing services in support of our mission to advance learning and scholarship. One such service, launched in 2019, is North Broad Press (NBP), a joint Libraries/Press open access imprint that provides Temple faculty with an opportunity to author their own open textbook.

NBP primarily publishes high-quality open educational resources by members of the Temple community, with limited additional capacity to support scholarly monographs, edited volumes, and digital scholarly projects. Everything we publish is open access and goes through a traditional book production process, including peer review by two independent experts in the field. Copyediting, typesetting, and design are provided at no cost, and we allocate stipends to some Temple authors to support writing an original open textbook. To date, we have published five textbooks and have sixteen in varying stages of progress. All NBP titles are published our Manifold platform.

Temple began using Manifold when the NBP imprint was announced and at a time when the Press was strategizing on sustainable open access models for traditional titles. After evaluating the options for hosting and publishing open access books, including the ease of integration with our established procedures, support for digital enhancements, and cost, we applied for and were chosen as one of ten publishers to participate in a 2019 pilot program on using Manifold.  

We kicked off our Manifold collections in 2020 with four Press titles previously published as part of the American Literatures Initiative (ALI). Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, ALI supported the publication of important scholarship in literary studies, which had become an underfunded and under-resourced discipline from which fewer titles were able to be published. Open access availability of these titles matched the spirit of the grant by expanding their reach and supporting their use in ways beyond the traditional print and electronic editions….”