“The University of Sheffield is one of three leading UK research-intensive universities to set up a new open access digital platform to publish scholarly articles across the academic disciplines. Sheffield has joined forces with the universities of Leeds and York to establish the White Rose University Press (WRUP) universitypress.whiterose.ac.uk which opened for submissions this week. It will publish peer-reviewed academic papers, books, textbooks, and conference literature from across the academic community both in the UK and internationally. Online access to all the published material is free to all readers. A partnership of the three universities’ libraries developed WRUP with three key objectives: Supporting open access: With its output free to readers in digital form, WRUP hopes to reach a global audience, some of whom may have hitherto faced challenges accessing scholarly materials behind subscription paywalls; Ensuring academic quality: WRUP’s distinguished editorial board, drawn from academics across the three universities, will oversee a rigorous process of peer-review and quality control – ensuring that intellectual quality is paramount; Creating new opportunities for publishing: As well as publishing traditional books and journals, WRUP intends to support scholars working in specialist areas, or publishing in non-traditional forms such as short-form monographs, data journals, or interactive ebooks, which have been overlooked by commercial publishers.

• “White Rose University Press is dedicated to open access publishing of high quality academic books, textbooks, journals, and conference proceedings. Our subject scope reflects the broad range of disciplines supported by our parent Universities, including arts and humanities, social sciences, science and technology, engineering, and medicine. Our goal is to disseminate scholarly outputs as widely as possible, by making our digital publications free at the point of access.”