punctum is affiliated with the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) Library, and together they have developed an OA book publishing model that never charges fees to authors and privileges skills and knowledge sharing between librarians, publishers, and scholar-researchers.

Values

Our values include Academic Freedom, Attachment, Care, Collectivism, Counter-Publishing, Dissidence, Enjoyment, Equity, Experimentation, Fugitivity, Itinerancy, Optimism, Play, Public-Making, Resistance, Social Justice, Teratology, Un/Disciplinarity, Well-Being.

To read punctum’s full vision statement visit: https://punctumbooks.com/about/vision-statement/

Governance

Punctum’s governance includes an Executive Advisory Board of 4 persons who give the Directors (Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy and Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei) advice on strategic planning, an Editorial Advisory Board who serve as the final arbiters for manuscripts accepted for publication, and a Library Advisory Board, made up of representatives from the libraries that help to underwrite punctum’s operations, who advise the Directors on strategic planning as well as provide ongoing feedback relative to punctum’s Supporting Library Membership Program. The Library Advisory Board has a formal annual meeting and also convenes informally on other occasions as issues and concerns arise for which punctum needs advice from its library advisers. 

Future plans 

With additional, continuing support from university libraries and other funders, punctum plans to expand its production output from approximately 40 books per year to 50 books per year. In addition we would like to have the staffing capacity to develop new imprints and book series (we currently have 11 of these), and to be able to augment and expand the outreach we do on behalf of our authors and books (marketing and promotion). We also want to launch a new “restoration / archival” imprint for republishing, in print and open digital editions, the catalogs of small, alternative presses that have gone out of business and whose books, historically important, are not open access nor even digital and are difficult to locate. To develop this program we also need more staffing capacity relative to acquisitions and production.