Hosted by the Division of Information at The Australian National University, ANU E Press was established in 2003 to explore and enable new modes of scholarly publishing. Taking advantage of new information and communication technologies to make available the intellectual output of the academic community of ANU, the primary focus of ANU E Press is the production of electronic scholarly works. All works are also available for purchase through a Print on Demand (PoD) service.

ANU E Press produces fully peer-reviewed research publications and is recognised by DIISRTE as a commercial publisher, enabling ANU E Press authors to gain full recognition under the Higher Education Research Data Collection scheme.

The decision to establish ANU E Press was based on:

• a recognition of the need to create an effective mechanism for disseminating high quality ANU scholarship that lacks a ready commercial market
• a determination to eliminate barriers inherent in existing models of scholarly communication
• an acceptance that the operational overheads of the conventional academic press are no longer affordable
• a realisation that emergent electronic press technologies offer a feasible alternative to the conventional academic press in terms of cost and available infrastructure.

Through active engagement and modification of current generation technologies, ANU E Press:

• provides standardised publishing processes via a generic set of publishing workflows
• provides content indexing in the form of subject headings and metadata, as well as hyperlinked term indexing through scripted generation
• converts original format files to XML, in order to facilitate the production of electronic editions of previously published scholarly titles
• publishes works in both electronic and print formats

Submission and peer review process

Manuscript submissions to ANU E Press office are referred to the relevant Editorial Committee for consideration. The Editorial Committee determines whether the proposal is of interest and, if so, requests a manuscript evaluation via independent peer review (a double-blind process, with at least two referees and at least one of these referees being external to the ANU). The process from peer-review to final copy-editing is the responsibility of the Editorial Committee. Once the copy-edited manuscript has been accepted for publication, ANU E Press commences the production cycle.

Format

Ebooks are freely available in a range of formats: Acrobat PDF, ePub, HTML for onscreen viewing and HTML and mobi for mobile devices. These formats, as well as Print-on-Demand (PoD) books, are generated from a single source file (XML). Printed books are available from Amazon, Melbourne University Bookshop and Co-op Bookshops, the ANU E Press website, and any bookstore subscribing to the Global Books in Print bibliographic database.

Titles

ANU E Press titles range across a wide variety of of academic disciplines and include monographs, journals and conference proceedings, as well as biographies of key scholarly figures. Over 55 titles were produced in 2010, and over 350 titles have been published to date. All titles are legally deposited with the National Library of Australia.

Statistics

Statistics gathered from ANU E Press web activities demonstrate a high level of download and online viewing of E Press titles, as well as witnessing continued dramatic growth:

• In 2011, there were 4,280,168 total downloads of ANU E Press titles
• In 2010, there were 3,435,241 total downloads of ANU E Press titles
• In 2009, there were 3,090,081 total downloads of ANU E Press titles
• In 2008, there were 2,747,445 total downloads of ANU E Press titles
• In 2007, there were 1,252,735 total downloads of ANU E Press titles
• In 2006, there were 745,288 total downloads of ANU E Press titles
• In 2005, there were 381,740 total downloads of ANU E Press titles

Facilitating accessibility of ANU E Press titles in physical format (via Print on Demand service) is also assisted through the entry of titles into bibliographic data systems, such as the National Library of Australia Catalogue in Publication and Global Books in Print.