Infrastructure and services for mission-driven publishers
Fulcrum is a community-based, open-source publishing platform that helps publishers present the full richness of their authors' research outputs. Our design principles are flexibility, durability, discoverability, accessibility, and integrity.
Overview
By adopting an agile development approach and working in partnership with other open-source communities, Fulcrum is responsive to the changing needs of digital scholars.
Built on research university library infrastructure specifically designed to curate digital objects, Fulcrum is a trusted steward committed to preservation and stability.
Interoperable with other publishing tools and integrated into the information supply chain, Fulcrum ensures that content is discovered by readers and impact is tracked.
Dedicated to creating inclusive services and content for all readers, Fulcrum aims to implement accessible systems and features and effect change among peers and partners by sharing and maintaining a high standard of accessibility.
Sustaining the future of the Fulcrum platform requires that we have a business model that allows us to keep the core strong, that we communicate with honesty and transparency, and take responsibility for our actions.
Do you want to create and sell an ebook collection to libraries? Host open access books in a values-based open source environment? Help your authors publish their interactive scholarly work without breaking the bank? Publishers control their digital destiny with Fulcrum.
Case Studies
i used to love to dream
Fulcrum helped bring together and lend scholarly credibility to A.D. Carson’s vision of a new scholarly genre: the mixtap/e/ssay. Combining a mixtape of self-produced or independently released album issued free of charge to gain publicity and the personal and scholarly essays. The tracks are presented along with liner notes and a short documentary about the making of the mixtap/e/ssay, and accompanying articles to provide context for the tracks for listeners both in classrooms and outside of them. i used to love to dream won the Association of American Publisher’s 2021 Prose Award for Best E-Product.
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Music on the Move
A dynamic multimedia introduction to the global connections among peoples and their music, Fulcrum served as a platform that could support Fosler-Lussier’s innovative multimodal scholarship that blends audio, video, playlists, and interactive maps, to produce a highly accessible, jargon-free, and media-rich digital monograph that is suitable for students as well as general-interest readers.
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The Chemistry of Character in Breaking Bad
This multimedia, open access project explores the landmark American television series Breaking Bad (2008–13) via the emerging format of videographic criticism. Fulcrum supports author Jason Mittell's collection of open access video essays to produce a “videographic book”, which aims to interpret the particular modes of characterization within the series and discusses the significance of character as an aspect of media storytelling. With this innovative project, Mittell demonstrates the vital importance and exciting possibilities of analyzing a medium using its own media form.
View ProjectDevelopment
Fulcrum provides essential non-profit infrastructure to the mission-driven academic publishing community. Fulcrum has been developed with support from the Mellon Foundation and is being made available as a hosted solution through a business development relationship with Lyrasis. Hosting and supporting publishing services are provided by a team of publishing and technology experts based at the University of Michigan Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Read more about Fulcrum...
