UCL Press partners with Worldreader

UCL Press, the UK’s first fully open access university press, announced today that their content will be distributed by Worldreader, a non-profit organisation with a mission to bring digital books to readers in the Global South, as one resource for them to draw on and so improve their lives by providing access to materials otherwise unavailable.

UCL Press will provide access to books that seek to address the grand challenges as experienced in the Global South. UCL Press will aim to publish a number of volumes on this theme. An early example is Participatory Planning for Climate Compatible Development in Maputo, Mozambique, a practitioners’ handbook (dual language English-Portuguese) that builds upon the experience of a pilot project that was awarded the United Nations ‘Lighthouse Activity’ Award. Look here for further information.

Worldreader, which has its headquarters in San Francisco with offices in Barcelona, London, Accra and New Delhi, has reached in excess of 5 million readers in 69 countries since 2010 by offering free e-books on its platforms for use on e-readers, mobile phones and via other digital technologies.

Paul Ayris, CEO of UCL Press said: “This partnership demonstrates not only UCL’s commitment to removing the barriers to quality scholarly content, but also to addressing the grand challenges of the Global South. We are delighted to announce this partnership.”

Dame Nicola Brewer, Vice-Provost (International) said: “This initiative fits neatly with UCL’s new Global Engagement Strategy, which  expresses our commitment to maximising impact from research through open access. Making scholarship more easily – and cheaply – available to a wider range of countries speaks in particular to one of our strategic drivers: increasing global independent research capability. And it is in tune with the spirit of a generous partner, and the concept of ‘partnerships of equivalence’. So I am delighted that UCL is teaming up with Worldreader to offer this.”