In a publishing agreement that reaches across boundaries, Cornell University Library has partnered with Duke University Press to establish a joint venture to expand and enhance the services of Project Euclid, the premier online information community for mathematics and statistics resources from independent publishers.

Project Euclid was established in 2000 by Cornell Library with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It created an online presence for a group of nonprofit independent and society journals in mathematics and statistics, to help them thrive in the increasingly competitive and commercial world of scholarly publishing. It is now home to 93,000 journal articles (75 percent of which are open access) from 54 journals, along with 60 monographs and conference proceedings. In addition to being an online publishing service and repository, Project Euclid may also in the future provide publishers and editors with tools to streamline their editorial and peer-review processes, as well as showcase and deliver their content in a more timely and cost-effective manner.

The collaboration is unique, said Terry Ehling, executive director of Project Euclid, because this is the first time "a university press and a library that don't share the same genetic material have entered into formal partnership." Duke was involved in the original planning for Project Euclid, she said, and "their formal association and complementary strengths now afford a singular opportunity to expand Euclid's footprint nationally and abroad."

Duke is one of the leading university presses in the nation, and its journals publishing program is one of the five largest, Ehling explained. "Duke University Press will bring expertise in marketing, order fulfillment and recruitment of new journals," she said, "Our collaboration with Duke Press will allow the library to do the things it does best -- provide innovative technology and promote fundamental changes in the publishing and delivery of scholarly information."

"A collaboration that pairs the complementary strengths of a leading research library and a university press from different universities is an extraordinary move," agreed Anne Kenney, the Carl A. Kroch University Librarian. "The result is nothing less than securing the future of alternative publishing options for independent presses in the fields of mathematics and statistics."

The joint venture was undertaken in cooperation with the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, an alliance of universities, research libraries and organizations, created by the Association of Research Libraries. Leadership for Project Euclid will be assumed by management at both Cornell and Duke when the agreement takes effect in July.