by Toby Steiner

Over the last few years, I have had the opportunity to closely follow the work of a variety of community- and scholar-led publishing initiatives, while also becoming more deeply involved with a few of them. Most notable for me here has been the work of the Radical Open Access Collective (ROAC), which provides a loose conceptual framework for not-for-profit presses, journals, and other communities that subscribe to a progressive notion of open access with a focus on creative experimentation, while many of them also engage in thorough critiques of mainstream open access against the backdrop of the prevalent neoliberal Higher Education system. As Adema and Moore (2017) write, the ROAC “highlights the importance of making publishing more diverse, equitable, and open to change, where it wants to ensure that new and underrepresented cultures of knowledge are able to have a voice.”

The other collective that I’ve been excited to work with – through the recently-ended Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project – is the ScholarLed consortium. ScholarLed comprises a group of independent and scholar-led Open Access book publishers who joined forces in a collaborative endeavour to share (often tacit) knowledge, experiences, and book publishing practices, while also collaborating on shared goals under the emerging principle of what now has become known as ‘scaling small’ (see e.g. Adema & Moore, 2021).

With my own background in the Humanities and having previously worked with various projects in Open Publishing and Open Scholarship more broadly, I have been drawn to the work of both groups right from their inception in 2015 and 2018, respectively. Correspondingly, and over the years, I have seen notions of community- and scholar-led publishing emerge in a variety of contexts, and, as it turns out, with sometimes surprisingly divergent connotations.

Intrigued by this and accompanied by ongoing engagement with the ever-growing body of research on the topic of independent, scholar-led publishing, I have for a couple of years tried to make sense of how terms such as community-led and scholar-led are being applied in different contexts to describe particular sets of approaches to scholarly publishing.

In case you are interested in learning more about this always developing field yourself, make sure to check out this topical Zotero collection, which has lots of pointers to e. g. the foundational research by ROAC members Janneke Adema and Sam Moore. To provide a set of examples that may illustrate the multitude of scholar-led initiatives that exist in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the below interactive timeline might also be of interest.

What I continue to be fascinated by is the daily usage of a whole set of terms in scholarly communications circles that relate to this type of publishing activity… and how much the corresponding underlying interpretations still seem to differ, although the terms themselves – including “scholar-led”, “academic-led”, “library-led”, “community-led”, “community-driven”, etc. – often tend to be used quasi-synonymously.

Unfortunately, it turns out that this kind of conceptual fuzziness can become problematic when we account for the different contexts that each of these groups is operating in, and the correspondingly different motivations and politics that they might bring to the larger metaphorical table of open access publishing.

Take, for example, the difference of realities that library-led and scholar-led publishing initiatives are working in: while the former, i.e. library-led initiatives, might well be able to rely on backing from their home institution when it comes to questions of e.g. access to financial, legal, infrastructural and/or staffing support, the latter, i.e. scholar-led initiatives, are often looking for more independence and direct, self-determined agency in how to define their publishing communities and the – often more experimental – practices and corresponding theoretical underpinnings of their activities, and have thus have deliberately sought to remove themselves from institutional dependencies.[1]

From a diachronic perspective, there are a variety of factors that have played important parts in enabling scholar-led publishing's drive towards independence over the years: technical affordances in digital publishing since the late 1990s/early 2000s such as the availability of content management systems – take, e.g. the popular blogging platform WordPress, and bespoke open-source solutions such as PKP's Open Journal System and Open Monograph Press, and Lodel, plus a variety of newer digital platforms for publishing scholarly content such as Janeway, PubPub, Editoria, and Scalar, to name but a few – have enabled scholars to cease the means of scholarly production and run their own, independent scholar-led publishing ventures for both journals and the scholarly long-form (monographs, edited collections, etc.). Particularly in the context of book publishing, the technological affordance of Print on Demand cannot be overstated: Print on Demand's wide-spread availability since the mid-2000s provided scholars with the means to not only publish long-form scholarship in digital form, but also make print books available themselves. As Paul Ashton, founder of re.press (launched in 2006) notes:

[Print on demand] allows equal entry for publishers into the whole book system regardless of size or power. I see this as possibly the most important thing that’s happened for publishing in the last 20 years; to some extent it is even as important as open-access models. ('Interview with Paul Ashton', Out of Ink)

It also needs to be noted that for some presses, the drive towards independence has also been motivated by previous experiences made, e.g. when scholar-led presses had sought support from their universities but eventually learned that this support was either simply not available at their institution, or was tied to an understanding from the institution's side (often in a US and/or UK context) that the new press should become self-sustaining or even generate profit for the university (see e.g. Ottina 2013, Adema & Stone 2017 & Interviews) – an institutional expectation that stood in direct opposition to the belief system and convictions of the scholars involved. Likewise, some scholar-led presses sought collaborations with libraries, with some of these remaining active to this day (as in the case of punctum's collaboration with UCSB), while others have faded out over time (as in the case of Open Humanities Press).

Coming back to the issue of terminology, one can perceive vast differences in how these terms are used in different national contexts: take, for example, the US and UK, where most proponents seem to have settled on a general understanding of “community-led” publishing as representing the widest-possible, broad-stroke and “big tent” description of any kind of initiative that has its roots firmly in the academic community, in whatever shape or form, seeking to bring together the various sub-groups such as independent scholars, affiliated academics, library publishers, or scholarly associations, and hence focusing on inclusive academic communities that might seek to break free from large corporate publishers’ control.

Looking at the terminology, in this interpretation shaped by UK/US discourse, one would then zoom in towards the more specific subsets of e.g. 'library-', 'academic-', 'scholar-', or
'association-led' publishing, with an aim to highlight each subgroup’s more specific conditions, practices, and corresponding politics. Speaking from a linguistic perspective, one might hint at a semantic Hypernym-Hyperonym relation between 'community-led' publishing (as the Hypernym), and the more specific notions as the Hyperonyms. Or, to put it more plainly, 'community-led' publishing, in an English-speaking US/UK-focused connotation would be the broad-stroke umbrella term, under which more specific subgroups such as institution-led, library-led, university-led, society-led, or scholar-led approaches might be subsumed (see illustration of the different relationalities below).

Now, let's have a look at further differences in the use of notions of 'scholar-led' and 'community-led' publishing in other international contexts. Drawing on a variety of conversations with colleagues from Germany over the last couple of years, I have formed the impression that German scholarly communications discourse tends to apply an opposite logic: while also often relying on English terminology to describe publishing initiatives e.g. as 'scholar-led' in German-language discussions of the topic, there are many for whom the term 'scholar-led' publishing seems to signify an overarching umbrella notion, which in turn then directly overlaps with what colleagues from the US and UK would call 'community-led' publishing. Conversely, in German discourse, I have seen uses of the terminology then branching out into more specific subgroups such as 'independent', 'community-led', or 'library-led' approaches …

For context, it is quite common in German-language scholarly communications discourse to either make use of anglicisms borrowed from the field of international, English-language publishing and scholarly communications, or to rely on translations of the English terminology. Even more complications occur in the latter context of translation because one-to-one equivalents to the English terms of ‘scholar’ and ‘academic’ do not exist in the German language: granted, there is 'Forschende' (aka. 'research-performing individuals', arguably with a terminological closeness generally attributed more to the STEM-focused ‘scientist’) vs. 'Wissenschaftlerin/Wissenschaftler' (aka. those active in academia) … but these come with yet another set of different connotations.

All of this is further complicated by another sub-differentiation that exists in English between 'academic' and 'scholar' i.e. 'academic' signifying a researcher with an institutional affiliation and corresponding work contract, vs. 'scholar' = those who are engaging with scholarship more broadly, and independent from institutional affiliation, which can also include e.g. para-academics without formal links to a university, academics who have moved on to other professions, but still like to engage in research and scholarship on their own account, etc. This is why many scholars have started to adopt 'scholar-led' as a more inclusive adjective compared to 'academic-led' – and this was also the reason why the ScholarLed consortium decided to choose specifically this adjective as their name.

Adding yet another layer of complications to the terminological melange, there are German-language notions of publishing as being “wissenschaftsgeführt” or “wissenschaftsgeleitet”, which, in German discourse, appears to be taken to represent a conceptual closeness to the German reading of “scholar-led” publishing. On the other hand, it might be argued that the German terms’ literal translation might be construed to mean “led by academia”, i. e. by the academic community at large – ergo, in US/UK terminology, to “community-led” publishing (see also Schlosser & Mitchell 2019). Thus, where there appears to be, in German understanding, an assumption of synonymy between "community-led" and "scholar-led" approaches, US and UK colleagues understand these to be quite different from each other, as we have explored a few paragraphs earlier.

Now, while it might seem as if we are splitting metaphorical hairs here, the importance of what to call a thing becomes apparent when we consider that these differences of interpretation – particularly around the meaning of 'scholar-led' or 'academic-led' publishing – are now making waves at the very high level of European policymaking. Note, for example, the pan-European group of funders, Coalition S, who are seeking to “develop a more scholar-led research ecosystem”[2], while appearing to describe scholar-led practices as needing to follow Plan S rules – which might seem surprising, given that scholar-led publishing, as understood in its original US/UK connotation, would be the one subgroup in the larger scholarly communications context that continues to question and break free from normative prescriptions from institutions or funders …

Similarly, the recently published draft proposal of a set of “Principles of Diamond Open Access Publishing” talks about a “community-driven, academic-led and -owned” scholarly ecosystem. And while there are mentions of the community in all shapes and forms – e.g. Principle 1, “Academic publishing must be collaboratively driven and led by academic communities”; or Principle 2, “[infrastructures] are controlled and owned by scholarly communities”, it seems like a missed opportunity to not use the notion of “community-led” instead of "academic-led" approaches to publishing to describe what the principles seek to address – that is, the role of academia at large, in all its plurality.

All in all, while the shift of focus towards Diamond OA and an implementation enacted together with, and for, the communities it serves is undoubtedly laudable, it seems pertinent to remind ourselves that the notion of 'scholar-led' can and should not serve as a catch-all or panacea to describe all kinds of initiatives led by a whole variety of stakeholders in the scholarly communications ecosystem seeking to break free from large commercial publishers.

A further note also needs to be added to highlight the fact that all of the adjectives listed here are usually understood only in a purely descriptive sense to specify and focus on certain groups in the larger publishing ecosystem, and do not per se touch on the rather different dimension of underlying value systems, i.e. values-led or -oriented approaches to publishing (which often appear to be implied in the former set of adjectives).

As has been argued above, scholar-led publishing points to a rather specific configuration within the larger publishing sphere that does exactly what it says on the tin: it focuses on scholars as the main actors and drivers behind a given publishing initiative. Or, as Sam Moore, with a focus on scholar-led monograph publishers, has noted previously on this blog:

Scholar-led publishers are just that, publishers led by scholars. I understand ‘scholars’ as broadly as possible, extending it to any actors who define their role as operating in a ‘scholarly’ capacity (library workers, independent scholars, etc.). ‘Led’, for me, is more specific and means managed by scholars, not just writing and editing the content, but the technical, practical and administrative sides to publishing too. Scholar-led projects comprise a mixture of the informal, the DIY and the spontaneous, alongside more professional publishing outlets like punctum books and Open Book Publishers (and everything in-between). (2019)

Maybe to add a short interpretational addendum to the above, Sam's mention of "operating in a scholarly capacity" for me points to a need to highlight the personal situatedness in which many practitioners in the scholarly communications ecosystem find themselves in: take, for example, many of our scholar-librarian colleagues who, by day, will represent their institution's views in institution-led contexts and beyond, while they also, by night / in their freetime, choose to put on their scholar's hat to engage in academic discourse that may be quite distinct from their day-to-day role and institutional employer's position …

Differentiating between scholar-led and other approaches to publishing remains important because it helps to avoid glossing over the manifold organisational, legal, financial, and/or conceptual differences that exist between the various actors in the larger publishing ecosystem, and the corresponding politics that each group of actors bring to the table. Hence, one might deem it important to push back against any accidental conflation of these terms, which would practically de-value the specific context of each of the adjectives discussed here – publishing led and run by (independent) scholars is distinctly different from e.g. library-led, or association-led approaches … and all of these approaches would fall under the umbrella of community-led publishing. To refer back to Janneke Adema's notion of messiness, yes, the publishing landscape remains messy – and we should develop and use language to describe different aspects of, and approaches to publishing in a meaningful way.

Hence, selecting "community-led" as the adjective of choice – as we have done, for example, with COPIM aka. Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs – to describe an inclusive "big tent" approach that seeks to bring together a wide variety of actors from a diverse spectrum of backgrounds, disciplines, and academic contexts under one larger umbrella (be they from an institutional background such as library publishing, or from independent, scholar-led publishing initiatives such as the ScholarLed consortium, the initiatives represented in the Radical Open Access Collective, or any other independent community) seems preferable in the larger context of policy work, compared to risking accidental co-optation of an already-existing niche that is proud to remain independent.

References

Adema, J. (2014). Embracing Messiness: Open Access Offers the Chance to Creatively Experiment with Scholarly Publishing. Impact of Social Sciences (blog). https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/11/18/embracing-messiness-adema-pdsc14/.

Adema, J. (2017). Interview transcriptions : Changing Publishing Ecologies. A Landscape Study of New University Presses and Academic-led Publishing. Jisc. https://repository.jisc.ac.uk/6652/.

Adema, J., & Moore, S. A. (2017, October 27). The Radical Open Access Collective: Building alliances for a progressive, scholar-led commons. Impact of Social Sciences Blog.  http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/.

Adema, J., & Moore, S. A. (2021). Scaling Small; Or How to Envision New Relationalities for Knowledge Production. Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 16(1). https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.918.

Adema, J., & Stone, G. (2017). Changing Publishing Ecologies: A Landscape Study of New University Presses and Academic-Led Publishing. Jisc. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4420993.

Ashton, P. (2011). Interview with Paul Ashton, co-founder of re.press. Interview by Silvio Lorusso. Out of Ink | Future of the Publishing Industry. https://networkcultures.org/outofink/2011/09/13/interview-with-paul-ashton-co-founder-of-re-press/.

Fathallah, J. (2023). Governing Scholar-Led OA Book Publishers: Values, Practices, Barriers. https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.e6fcb523.

Moore, S. (2019). Common Struggles: Policy-based vs. scholar-led approaches to open access in the humanities. https://doi.org/10.17613/st5m-cx33.

Moore, S. (2019, October 24). Open *By* Whom? On the Meaning of ‘Scholar-Led’. ScholarLed Blog. https://blog.scholarled.org/on-the-meaning-of-scholar-led.

Ottina, D. (2013). From Sustainable Publishing To Resilient Communications. TripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society 11 (2): 604–13. https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v11i2.528.

Schlosser, M., & Mitchell, C. (2019). Academy-Owned? Academic-Led? Community-Led? What’s at Stake in the Words We Use to Describe New Publishing Paradigms. Library Publishing Coalition. https://librarypublishing.org/alpd19-academy-owned-academic-led-community-led/.

[1] This interpretation of scholar-led publishing builds on an ever-emerging body of research, see e. g. Adema & Stone 2017, Adema & Moore 2017, Moore 2019, Adema & Moore 2021, and Fathallah, 2023 for a variety of examples from scholar-led book publishing, with analyses of the stakeholders' underlying motivations.

[2] See https://twitter.com/LizzieGadd/status/1646866476035452928

ScholarLed are delighted to announce that two additional scholar-led presses will be joining our consortium: African Minds and mediastudies.press.

African Minds is a not-for-profit, open access publisher based in Cape Town, South Africa. They publish predominantly in the social sciences and their authors are typically African academics and thinkers, as well as international academics who have a close affinity with the continent. They offer a new publishing channel to authors frustrated by a lack of support from traditional book publishers as well as with publishing’s anachronistic and lengthy approach to making knowledge available.

mediastudies.press is a new, open-access publisher for the media and communication studies fields. Launched in 2019, the press is nonprofit and scholar-led. They publish living works, with iterative updates stitched into their process. And they encourage multi-modal submissions that reflect the mediated environments their authors study. Publishing with mediastudies.press is free on principle. Their aim is to demonstrate, on a small scale, an open-access publishing model supported by libraries rather than author fees. Open access for readers, they believe, should not be traded for new barriers to authorship.

We are also pleased to announce that our board has formally accepted Mattering Press, meson press, Open Book Publishers, and punctum books as members of ScholarLed. These four presses were founding members of ScholarLed before we registered as a not-for-profit foundation in the Netherlands, and have now formally become members of the foundation as per our constitution and membership criteria.

Jeff Pooley, from mediastudies.press writes:

“Not to be dramatic, but mediastudies.press owes its very existence to ScholarLed. We noticed when the consortium was created in 2018. That notice turned to excitement when we read about the member presses' commitments to BPC-free open access and mutual aid. We established mediastudies.press the next year, on the explicit example of the ScholarLed publishers. We have, in the two years since, soaked up the generous advice that the collective makes available on principle: one-on-one meetings, webinars, reports, blog posts, and sharing sessions. We've learned most of what we do from the ScholarLed group, all of it based on a "scaling small" philosophy that imagines growth by value-aligned example. From the moment we got started, our goal was to apply for membership, and then—in the spirit of the collective—to pass on what we've learned ourselves to future members.”

Francois van Schalkwyk, from African Minds shares their reasons for joining ScholarLed:

“After a few frustrating attempts at co-publishing with international publishers that are still relatively wet behind the ears when it comes to open access book publishing, African Minds has found a more welcoming and like-minded group of publishers at ScholarLed. We look forward to experimenting, sharing new ideas and to increasing the visibility of the collective’s open access books across the globe. And we hope that by joining ScholarLed, African Minds will make a modest contribution to encouraging other scholarly presses from outside the dominant markets to establish small but viable scholarly presses, join ScholarLed, or, at the very least, to explore open access book publishing models.”

The presses of ScholarLed are very excited that African Minds and mediastudies.press are joining our consortium, and we look forward to working alongside them in our collective mission to develop powerful, practical ways for small-scale, scholar-led open access presses to grow and flourish. Both presses bring new fields and communities and specific publishing expertise to the consortium, and we are looking forward to learning from them. Both presses have also already started to use Thoth, the open dissemination system that has been developed by the COPIM project, for their metadata, which is an example of the kind of systems and practices that allow academic-led presses to provide each other with forms of mutual support. We are delighted to welcome them to ScholarLed as we grow our community of academic-led publishers, highlighting the contributions and amplifying the voice of this vital part of the publishing ecosystem.

If you run a scholar-led press and would also like to join ScholarLed, please consult this essential information and get in touch at at info@scholarled.org with the name and website of your publishing house, and a person we can contact to discuss your application.

ScholarLed is a consortium of scholar-led, not-for-profit, open access book publishers, founded in 2018 by Mattering Press, meson press, Open Book Publishers, Open Humanities Press, and punctum books. As open access book publishers in the Humanities and Social Sciences, we share a commitment to opening up scholarly research to diverse readerships, resisting the marketisation of academic knowledge production, and working collaboratively rather than in competition. Collectively we are developing ways for small-scale, scholar-led Open Access presses to grow and flourish in a publishing landscape that is changing rapidly.

We are delighted and proud to announce that ScholarLed is now registered as a not-for-profit foundation in the Netherlands. We are run by a board drawn from the participating presses (see our bylaws here) and welcome like-minded scholar-led presses to join our consortium. Read more about how to become a member of ScholarLed here.

Why join ScholarLed?

As a collective of scholar-led presses we are establishing collaborative modes of working and building shared infrastructures to  support the work of publishers like us. We call this ‘scaling small’.

• We have established a ScholarLed catalogue on OAPEN, which includes hundreds of open access books published by our presses giving weight and visibility to our publications.
• We have developed a lightweight bookstand, allowing us to showcase the output of the whole consortium at conferences and events. (The design and instructions to create your own version of the bookstand, as well as the source code of our website, are freely available for other presses to use here on our website.)
• We are also key partners in the international COPIM project, giving member presses potential access to community-owned, open systems, meta-data management solutions and infrastructures in development.

The founding presses operate in Europe, the UK, the US, and Australasia. Already somewhat distributed, we would love to collaborate with  presses from different scholarly, disciplinary, institutional and geographic locations and encourage you to join forces with us to strengthen the global collective stewardship of open access. For us, this requires removing structural and organisational barriers holding back change in the open books landscape while being aware, supportive and respectful of the differences amongst us.

Please get in touch at info@scholarled.org if you want to learn more about ScholarLed or join us.

The Community-led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project is looking to recruit a Research Associate to work on two of the project’s key work packages. The Research Associate will support three of the project’s team leaders in the following two areas: (1) Developing and Piloting a Revenue Management Platform for OA Books; (2) Researching and Piloting Alternative Business Models for OA Books.

The post is full time for 34 months and is hosted by Lancaster University, although the Research Associate will have the opportunity to work remotely from other locations. The salary is in the range of £28,331 to £32,817. The position involves working across the Department of Sociology, the Department of Organisation, Work and Technology, and the Institute for Social Futures, as well as with a range of partners including ScholarLed.

The candidate should have a graduate degree (Master’s degree or higher), preferably within the Humanities, Social Sciences, or Library Science, with practical experience and/or research expertise in scholarly communications, digital publishing, media and technology studies, library and information sciences, and/or OA publishing.

Please contact Joe Deville (j.deville@lancaster.ac.uk) and Martin Eve (martin.eve@bbk.ac.uk) for more information about the project and for an informal discussion about the post.

To apply, and for further details, follow the link below. The closing date is Sunday 1^st December

https://hr-jobs.lancs.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx?ref=A2865

Cover image by faungg. Used under a CC BY-ND 2.0 license. No changes have been made to the image.

Hi Lucy and Janneke from the ScholarLed Team and thanks for joining us here!  Could you start off by letting us know a little bit about the ScholarLed consortium? What kind of experiences sparked the collective to life, who are its members, and how does it contribute to making Open Access a reality to SSH scholars?

ScholarLed are a group of five not-for-profit, Open Access book publishers who are developing powerful, practical ways for small-scale and scholar-led OA presses to flourish and make an impact in a changing publishing landscape.

Our members are Mattering Press, meson press, Open Book Publishers, Open Humanities Press, and punctum books. (Lucy is part of Open Book Publishers and Janneke is part of Open Humanities Press.) We have diverse publishing programmes and missions, but we all share a commitment to an academic-led, not-for-profit OA ethos and to transitioning away from the Book Processing Charge (BPC) model of funding for Open Access books.

We first came together as part of a pilot project facilitated by OpenAire funding, which looked at non-BPC business models. This was the spark that set the whole thing going -- it gave us the opportunity to work on our ideas together and deepened the relationships between the presses -- and we realised that an ongoing collaboration between smaller publishers had the potential to achieve a huge amount. We’ve termed this approach ‘Scaling Small’, borrowing a concept first developed by Janneke and Sam Moore of the Radical Open Access Collective.

This idea of ‘scaling small’ is particularly useful given that the sceptical response to the work of an independent, academic-led OA press is often: “this is great, but how does it scale up?” Rather than focusing on how individual presses can get bigger, we believe that if greater numbers of OA publishers were able to flourish -- to be financially sustainable, without the need to charge authors to publish Open Access, and to be able to support work that they believe in -- we could create a much more diverse, lively and fruitful scholarly commons. Instead of scaling up, we need to create a publishing system that works at multiple scales. Our members are of varying sizes: some publish two or three books a month, and some publish two or three books a year, but we envision a landscape in which it is possible for academic-led presses of whatever size to thrive.

To this end, we led the creation of the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project, which is designed to build much-needed community-controlled, open systems and infrastructures that will develop and strengthen Open Access book publishing. With international partners including Birkbeck, University of London; Trinity College, Cambridge; Lancaster University; University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) Library; Loughborough University Library; Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB); Jisc Collections; and the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC); and with a £2.2 million grant from the Research England Development fund as well as a grant of £800,000 from Arcadia, we will be working over the next three years to turn this vision into a reality.

How would you position ScholarLed in the increasingly crowded Open Access publishing landscape?

Obviously there are many players in the OA landscape, with a variety of approaches to Open Access and different concepts of what OA publishing should look like. We believe it is important for scholar-led OA to have a strong voice in the resulting debates over Open Access. Ultimately, academic publishing should serve the scholarly community -- which includes para-academics, students, ECRs, independent scholars, librarians, archivists, and many more -- and their readers. Presses led by academics are uniquely positioned to be able to bring together our expertise as publishers with our perspectives and ambitions as members of the academic community, in order to drive forward the public presentation and dissemination of scholarly research.

ScholarLed is a collaborative enterprise, which means that our member presses all have different approaches and aims for what we want to achieve individually, and we can therefore interact flexibly with the wider OA landscape -- while still sharing objectives as ScholarLed. For example, we are all individual members of the Radical Open Access Collective, which is a larger and looser grouping of OA publishers; we have our own individual partnerships and projects with libraries, with funders and with academic institutions; our own business models; and our own ambitions for what we want to publish. We can share our different experiences with each other and bring this kaleidoscope of relationships to bear on our work as ScholarLed, which provides us with a more focused channel to work on certain projects together -- be they larger-scale endeavours such as COPIM, or smaller-scale initiatives such as our Twitter feed (@scholarled), our blog (which has been publishing a number of posts during OA Week from a wide range of contributors, including DARIAH’s Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra), or our conference stand, which allows us to showcase the work of all the ScholarLed members when any of us attends an event.

Scholar-led means that the OpenAccess book publishers who form the collective are run by academics or professionals who are still closely working together with researchers and research institutions. Why is this important for you? How do scholars' own involvement in publishing lead us to reimagine the relationship between publishing, humanities disciplines and the university?

As mentioned earlier, we believe it is important for academics to be directly involved in the publishing process -- this is not to say that every academic should be a publisher, but that academic-led publishing should be influential in the global dissemination of research. To some extent, we see ourselves as an oppositional voice in a publishing environment that can drift too far towards blunt statistical methods of assessment, such as impact factors. We want to show that publishing can operate differently -- that there can be a place for more niche or for more radical voices, and that research which might not necessarily sell a lot of books can still find a significant audience and have a meaningful impact if it is published OA. We are concerned that publishing should serve scholarship, and not the other way around.

As for the relationship between publishing and the university -- it’s important to note that the ScholarLed presses are not university presses. They are all independent, although some have close ties with certain institutions; for example Open Book Publisher’s co-Directors are all members of the University of Cambridge, and punctum has a close relationship with UCSB Library. This independence is important: we are not yoked to the ‘brand’ of any particular university and we each govern ourselves, so we are free to act and speak without institutional loyalties or hierarchies being brought to bear. This allows us to be more nimble actors within the scholarly landscape and to pay attention to issues, to authors or to academic work that might not have a home within an institutional setting.

What drives authors to publish with the scholar-led born-Open-Access presses constituting ScholarLed?

Well, I guess you’d have to ask them! But according to some of the feedback we receive from authors, they value the care we take in the publishing process -- we understand from direct experience what it feels like to be in their position, and what academics want from a publisher. They appreciate that our aim is always to get their work to its readership, however big or small -- for example, if certain books focus on particular geographic regions, it’s exciting for authors if the readership metrics show that the work is being read there. They appreciate our non-profit ethos -- there is often an ethical aspect to the enthusiasm of authors who think that research should not be locked away for profit, and who believe in Open Access as a means of achieving equitable access to the knowledge they have created. Fundamentally, we see the publication of academic research as a collaboration with scholars to get their work out into the world in the best shape it can be, and researchers respond to that.

For arts and humanities scholars, the major challenges associated with Open Access publishing have to do with price and prestige. Let’s talk a bit first about the former. How are you able to lower costs and to move away from a BPC (Book Processing Charge) business model but still maintain rigorous, high-quality publishing services?

Our member presses all have different business models and ways of tackling this challenge. There are two sides to the question of sustainability: costs and revenue. The ScholarLed presses see lower distribution costs than those reported by traditional publishers -- Rupert Gatti, a co-Director of Open Book Publishers, has blogged about the possible reasons for this before, and the point was picked up by punctum in recent discussions online. This is also an area in which COPIM will intervene, by allowing us to pool and share our experiences in the process of developing shared infrastructure to bring down the costs of disseminating scholarly books.

The ScholarLed presses generally have hybrid revenue models, which combine some or all of the following: print sales (which are significant -- and it would be interesting to ask those presses that charge high BPCs how much they see sales affected when a book is published Open Access), download sales, reader subscriptions, library subscriptions, voluntary subventions and the monetization of downstream rights. However, effective systems for sustaining diverse funding flows between large numbers of parties are difficult to establish and costly to sustain. This is a particular problem for small and new publishers with limited resources -- but it is an area where there are substantial returns to scale and scope for significant cost reductions through the development of shared digital infrastructures. COPIM will also intervene here, by developing new digital infrastructures to support funding processes; by developing a collective consortial library funding program in horizontal partnerships with scholarly communication librarians internationally; and by researching and piloting alternative business models for OA presses.

It is important to emphasise that these developments -- both making dissemination more cost-effective and enabling alternative forms of revenue generation -- are not at the expense of the quality of the books themselves. The ScholarLed presses all have rigorous peer-review processes, and put considerable care and attention into presenting excellent research in the most engaging, high-quality and innovative ways. The expertise and labour involved in these tasks are no mean investment.

Speaking of the second challenge, the prestige economy: in the current reward system, scholars are highly motivated to publish in prestigious publication venues with a long tradition. Even those who support the idea of openness show cautiousness with Open Access book publishing assuming, sometimes rightfully so, that it would potentially hinder their careers. Can you maybe share success stories to the contrary from your practice?

We believe this cautiousness is beginning to shift because scholars can see the benefits of OA to their research in terms of readership and engagement, and because funders and research bodies are beginning to emphasise the importance of Open Access -- see, for example, the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the UK, which has indicated its intention to mandate Open Access publication for submitted monographs in the next cycle (after 2021). Many academics are also seeking alternatives to the so-called ‘prestige economy’, and questioning whether it serves their research to artificially limit their choices to a certain number of pre-sanctioned publishers. Especially since, as Deville, Sondervan, Wennström and Stone have highlighted in their recent article Rebels with a Cause? -- which successfully tackles some of the assumptions that continue to exist around Open Access publishing, New University Presses (NUPs) and Academic-Led Presses (ALPs) -- ‘these new presses are not just adhering to conventional publishing norms but are often innovating in order to surpass them’.

And it is not our experience that publishing Open Access has hindered anyone’s career -- quite the contrary! A few examples from Open Book Publishers and Open Humanities Press:

Open Book Publishers (OBP): Our author, Martin Eve, has just been awarded the prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize, which recognises the achievement of outstanding researchers at an early stage of their careers; the book he published with OBP -- Literature Against Criticism: University English and Contemporary Fiction in Conflict -- formed a major part of his submission portfolio for this award. Another of our authors, Andrew Hobbs, recently won the 2019 Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize for the best book on Victorian newspapers and periodicals for A Fleet Street in Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855-1900, which was also his first academic book. DARIAH members might be interested in our translation of Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, which won the British Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies' 2015 prize for digital publication. A number of senior and high-profile scholars have published with us, including Noam Chomsky, Catriona Seth, Amartya Sen, Caroline Warman, Ariel Rubinstein, Karl S. Guthke, Hans Walter Gabler and Patrick Bateson, and our books have been submitted to the UK REF assessment and are regularly reviewed in high-profile journals.

Open Humanities Press (OHP) has a strategy of building brand awareness by publishing outstanding humanities scholarship, to actively foster and link scholarly communities, and to empower scholars to achieve their intellectual vision. Authors seem to be attracted to OHP firstly because of the calibre of the people involved, and only secondarily because we publish OA. OHP was originally set up to demonstrate that high-profile, prestigious OA is possible in order to try to combat some of the prejudices against OA. Our editorial board is made up of world-leading senior scholars who have demonstrably moved their disciplines forward. Our book series editors are drawn from this board, and they attract authors through their own networks, which are often very substantial and already well established.

We at ScholarLed celebrate and champion the successes of our authors, and welcome the recognition we receive for the rigour and quality of our publications -- but we also caution against the idea that OA presses should simply be subsumed into the existing hierarchy of prestige and the metricisation of research assessment. Part of the mission of scholar-led publishing, as we see it, is to argue for an alternative to this way of doing things. The best way to measure the quality of research is to read it -- and thanks to OA, this is very easy to do!

How can the DARIAH communities interact with with ScholarLed?

There are various ways the DARIAH communities can interact with ScholarLed as a group, and with our member presses individually. If you’d like to explore the possibility of publishing with members of the consortium, you can find them listed on our website (or at the beginning of this blog post!) -- do contact them individually to begin a conversation. If you have thoughts about ways that ScholarLed as a group could be supporting innovative publication practices, you can get in touch with us via email at info@scholarled.org. The COPIM project has a work package dedicated to ‘Experimental Publishing, Re-Use and Impact’ -- if you would like to discuss this with COPIM or to find out more, please email Janneke Adema at ademaj@uni.coventry.ac.uk in the first instance.

We would love to share knowledge and information, be it about infrastructures or about individual projects -- the digital aspect is an essential part of OA publishing, and trying to imagine what the scholarly book looks like in the digital age should be the job of all publishers working today. We would welcome taking part in conferences and community events, writing blog posts, co-authoring papers… you name it! You can contact us on Twitter (@scholarled) or email (info@scholarled.org), and keep up to date with our activities via our website (https://scholarled.org/) and our blog (https://blog.scholarled.org/).

If you could give one piece of advice to scholars wishing to take more control over their scholarly works and make more informed publication choices, what would it be?

Don’t just think about it -- do it! Look around at the publishers available, interrogate their reach and their business models, and consider what is the best fit for your research in terms of readership, ethos, and quality of the books produced -- then reach out and begin a conversation. If you want to be more involved in the actual publishing process, look at the Radical Open Access Collective and their information portal for some practical and informative resources, keep an eye on the ScholarLed website for more on our activities and about COPIM, and drop us an email if you would like to discuss anything.

Thank you for your time! It has been great to learn from your insight and experience!

by Yvonne Nobis

I have been involved in Open, specifically Open Access, for over ten years. This is my personal reflection on the place we have reached in the UK, and my concerns as to where we are headed next, with the possibility of national consortia adopting ‘transformative’ read and publish agreements on the horizon.

It is a very long way from where we were in 2008, when heated debate raged on mailing lists arguing the benefits of ‘Green’ versus ‘Gold’ OA. Underlying this was the drive to provide free access to research literature and data.

The emphasis was very much on ‘Green’ OA and using institutional repositories to archive research and to make it available to researchers. However, little thought was given to infrastructure; institutions used repository software that worked for them and there was no investment in federated search across all institutional repositories.

There were few Open Access journal publishers: the University of Cambridge paid £485,000, mostly Wellcome-Trust-funded, to one Open Access publisher, BioMedCentral (now part of the Springer Nature stable) in article processing charges (APCs).  The only other Open Access publisher of note at this stage was PLOS, and both ran author workshops for us in 2008 and 2009 to introduce our library users to the idea of Open Access publishing. Attendance was somewhat limited, as OA was often seen as being a ‘niche’ activity.

The only international Open Access deal was SCOAP3, which enabled the conversion of journals to Open Access by paying publishers centrally for the costs of making journals Open Access in the area of high-level physics. This seemed revolutionary at the time, but with hindsight it has had the effect of tying in subscribers so that they publish in only a selection of journals, and they cannot cancel individual titles.

Ten years later, in 2017/18, post ‘Finch’ report, which supported ‘Gold author-pays’ OA, the University of Cambridge paid £2,847,135 in APCs over a 15-month period to publish research. The cost of the average APC increased from £1,794 in 2013 to £2,336 in 2018.   This amount was in addition to journal subscriptions.

Admittedly, a great deal more research is being made publicly available – with Heather Piwor and colleagues estimating that 45% of the scholarly literature was made available via OA in 2015. Yet the predicted ‘flip’ from subscription to Open Access does not seem to have occurred: for this to happen, all countries that publish research would have to publish Open Access, and there are significant barriers that make it difficult for many to afford this. Costs continue to escalate. Sadly the ‘serials crisis’  (which has been lamented in library circles since the 1980s, when the pricing of scientific journals started to rise by 50%) has been exacerbated in the UK by the national adoption of mandated Open Access to research and the growth in Open Access publishing by what are often called legacy publishers.  We are often paying both to access research via subscriptions and to publish via APCs, with some ‘hybrid’ journals managing to combine both models.

The current solution to the cost issue appears to be a move towards transformative agreements. Wholesale adoption of these by legacy publishers could result in block grants to universities being top-sliced and given directly to publishers, in effect officially outsourcing research dissemination to a few preferred suppliers.  (It is only fair to say I have heard praise from University librarians for ‘read-and-publish deals’ from smaller University Presses).  This may result in some potential administrative savings at the university level, but will reduce author choice, skew the market away from smaller players, and stifle innovation in scholarly communications.

At the same time, many publishing companies have tried to reposition themselves as research service providers. They now provide metrics on university publishing outputs, often linked to academic tenure and reward systems, which makes the dominance of a few key players all the more worrying. Moreover, the same publishers are now providing the tools for some institutional repositories, which are becoming increasingly important as a route to maintaining ‘Green’ open access.

So where does this leave Open Access to research and how can the open community put in place a sustainable infrastructure that helps to support Open Access to scholarship and retain some ownership of the research ecosystem?  Is it too late?

Clearly, funding is an issue, and much of this comes from outside libraries. Recently, philanthropic grant awards have been seen to provide support for open scholarship; for example, grants by the Arcadia Fund to support the creation of an open repository platform and to researchers to reform the role of universities and build them into information-sharing Open Knowledge Institutions.

Although welcome, I would caution that such grant-making activity is great for ‘kick-starting’ initiatives but may not be sustainable in the longer term.

A North American initiative proposed by David W. Lewis, Dean of the IUPUI University Library, proposes that academic libraries should commit 2.5% of their total budgets to organizations and projects that contribute to the common digital infrastructure need to support the open scholarly commons. A recent review by Kathleen Shearer of COAR found that Canadian libraries’ expenditure in support of Open Scholarship infrastructure ranged from 0.88% to 7.23%, with an average of 3%. Potentially this is a start.

Away from finance, there are community-led initiatives in support of establishing an open infrastructure, for example there are several projects looking at open citations – both how the data should be collected and what it should be used for – as these are vital for discovery and, in an increasingly metric-driven sector, assessment.

Support for ‘Green’ Open Access and repositories is regaining importance. Tools have been created to ensure that those who do not have access to subscription research are able to find an OA version – Unpaywall and the OA button. Günter Waibel, Associate Vice Provost & Executive Director, California Digital Library, states that following the University of California’s cancellation of its contract with Elsevier, the ‘Elsevier walk-away has reinforced our appreciation for green OA copies of articles available in repositories; as well as the continued importance of supporting UC faculty and staff in making their own article available in our eScholarship repository’.

Equally there are publishing initiatives that have developed workable open access models that are not cost prohibitive, a good example being the Open Library of Humanities, which provides a membership model for libraries, or overlay journals on pre-print servers and repositories. Overlay journals on the arXiv and institutional repositories are also meeting a researcher need, but at a minimum cost.

These initiatives, and the committed individuals behind them, do provide a ray of hope that Open Access will continue to be open to all!

Yvonne Nobis is Head of Physical Sciences Libraries at the University of Cambridge.

By Demmy Verbeke

It can be argued that Plan S is a success, even before it has come into effect. This ambitious plan by a group of funders, to mandate that all the publications resulting from research they support should be made available via an Open Access (OA) route, has been instrumental during the past year in fuelling the debate on OA. It has involved more and different people in the conversation and rekindled the hope that a real revision of our broken system of scholarly communication might be around the corner.

However, in our enthusiasm we should not underestimate the risk that Plan S, despite all its good intentions, makes matters worse instead of better. The sting is not hidden in the guidelines of Plan S as such, but in the way it tends to focus people’s mind on an implementation approach that is the least likely to bring us the intended result (which is nothing less than reclaiming control of scholarly communication). Despite the fact that the implementation guidelines for Plan S acknowledge the importance of a diversity of business models and indicate that the realisation of OA should not be limited to scholarly articles,[1] we still see that journals and legacy publishers dominate the discussion. This is especially highlighted by the present focus on transformative agreements with commercial publishers.

Theoretically, such transformative agreements make perfect sense. These contracts, which arrange access to journals for both readers and authors and therefore bundle subscription and publication costs, are called transformative because they aim to shift the emphasis from reading to publishing and are thus seen as a way to realize a shift from paywalled to Open Access. They increase the number of publications available in OA, put an end to double-dipping and have the potential to streamline OA publishing, making it very user-friendly for authors. However, one should not underestimate the significant investment needed from academic institutions to prepare and manage an acceptable transformative agreement. What is more, the idea that transformative agreements with commercial publishers are budget-neutral in the short term, and will drive down costs in the longer term, is, in my opinion, wishful thinking. Finally, this type of contract strengthens the market position of legacy publishers and the concentration on journals, and thus stand in the way of true innovation in the field of scholarly communication.

Unless we want to make a clean break by cancelling subscriptions and by refusing to exchange them for profit-driven publication fees – which some have convincingly argued for years is the only way to achieve real change[2] – transformative agreements with commercial publishers might be a necessary evil in those disciplines in which the legacy publishers call the shots because of their market share.[3] But this is not the case in the humanities. The humanities should refrain from implementing a bad solution to a problem that they can avoid. Rather than spending time, energy and budget on transformative agreements with commercial publishers, they should set an example by making sure that alternatives such as the Open Library of Humanities flourish, by getting OA for monographs (which are a central element of scholarly communication in the humanities) right, and by safekeeping the diversity of the market for scholarly publishing in the humanities.

Let’s stay polite. The commercial companies we blame for the current state of scholarly publishing might not be our best choice of preferred partner if we want to try and change that state. So instead of helping them to grow their market share even more, we should consider other options. In the humanities, this is almost as easily done as it is said, by choosing not to opt for transformative agreements with commercial publishers, by preferring publishing partners that have no history of betraying us, by getting the realisation of OA monographs right, and by making sure that our attention, budget and staff time are focused on developing and fostering alternatives rather than on affirming a broken system.

Demmy Verbeke is Head of Artes, a division of KU Leuven Libraries, and plays a central role in organizing library services for the Arts and Humanities at KU Leuven. He is a strong believer in (fair) Open Access and acts as section editor for the Open Library of Humanities.

[1] https://www.coalition-s.org/principles-and-implementation/; see also the very handy https://101innovations.wordpress.com/2019/06/15/nine-routes-towards-plan-s-compliance-updated/

[2] See e.g. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2011/11/09/functionality-academic-publishing/ and numerous other blog posts by Björn Brembs.

[3] V. Larivière et al., “The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era”, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502

By Sam Moore

I write a lot about scholar-led publishing. My thesis explored the differences between scholar-led and policy-based forms of open access, and I’ve recently published an article about early academic-led experiments in e-journal publishing. I love what the ScholarLed consortium is doing for open access and look forward to seeing the infrastructures and forms of governance that the consortium members design and build for open monograph publishing.

Having an interest in this area means I get asked quite frequently what scholar-led publishing actually is. Anecdotally speaking, some people feel that the term implies a general reclaiming of publishing by the academy, a wresting control of publishing and related infrastructures from the greedy corporate publishers. Yet I think about scholar-led publishing with a bit more specificity. For me, scholar-led publishing does not carry much ethical weight as a concept, much like library- and university press-led forms of publishing. Instead, the term simply refers to a model of publishing reflecting the fact that some scholars have decided to publish research themselves.

Scholar-led publishers are just that, publishers led by scholars. I understand ‘scholars’ as broadly as possible, extending it to any actors who define their role as operating in a ‘scholarly’ capacity (library workers, independent scholars, etc.). ‘Led’, for me, is more specific and means managed by scholars, not just writing and editing the content, but the technical, practical and administrative sides to publishing too. Scholar-led projects comprise a mixture of the informal, the DIY and the spontaneous, alongside more professional publishing outlets like punctum books and Open Book Publishers (and everything in-between).

This specificity is important for two reasons. Firstly, it illustrates that scholar-led publishing is not merely publishing with the needs of scholars in mind. It is more specific than terms like ‘community-led’ or ‘community-controlled’ that illustrate the potential of projects to reorient publishing towards the needs of researchers and away from mere market concerns. The vagueness of ‘community-led’ is a drawback for those arguing for a particular ethical conception of publishing: who gets to decide who the community is, how it can best be served, and who is not part of it? As we have seen with terms like ‘open access’, commercial publishers are successfully able to exploit vagueness in terminology for their own ends and it is not difficult to imagine them trying so with scholar-led publishing too. (These tensions are also explored in an excellent piece on the LPC blog by Melanie Schlosser and Catherine Mitchell.)

While there certainly are grey areas and blindspots associated with ‘scholar-led’, I maintain that it is better to approach the term as merely descriptive rather than something laden with ethics and values. Of course, many approaches to scholar-led publishing do adopt an ethical position towards what they are doing, and there are themes that one can perceive in the general trend of scholar-led publishing (as Janneke Adema and I explored with respect to the Radical Open Access Collective). Yet these different ethical approaches are not best represented within the concept of ‘scholar-led publishing’ and instead constitute the struggle around what the futures of publishing should be. Scholar-led publishing is thus useful more as a narrowly-defined term than a broad direction in which academic publishing is heading.

This brings us to the second reason why a specific definition of ‘scholar-led’ is helpful. It helps us differentiate between different models for publishing based within libraries, university presses, and other kinds of publisher. Each of these models requires different skills (that need to be valued and supported) and each has a lot to learn from the others. This means that there are many important approaches to publishing, all of which have a part to play in the push for more ethical, experimental and open publishing futures. Part of the move to open access will entail collaboration between these efforts.

The point here is that although scholar-led publishing is hugely important for the future of open access, this does not mean that everything has to managed by working academics. Publishing is a skill and not necessarily one that every scholar has to learn (though more awareness of what publishing entails wouldn’t go amiss). Such a situation would cheapen the labour of those already engaged in ethical publishing efforts, while increasing the amount of work researchers already have to do, thus conforming to the ever-increasing austerity in higher education whereby universities continually require researchers to do more with less.

I am not saying that anyone is seriously arguing that all publishing should be entirely managed by full-time, working academics (though I could probably find someone arguing as such in the far reaches of the open science movement…). Rather, we should be clear about what scholar-led publishing actually means and especially how it can help point us to a better publishing future. Personally, I feel that scholar-led forms of open access – and the work of the ScholarLed consortium in particular – can help influence the future of all forms of publishing through its focus on non-commercial, experimental and collaborative practices. It is counter-hegemonic in its ability to push back on market-centric publishing and represents new practices that that other publishers could adopt.

So, a key consideration of what scholar-led publishing is should also be what it is not. Establishing this will help us understand how we can work with, influence and govern other forms of publishing in accordance with the explorative work of scholar-led publishers.

Sam Moore is a Lecturer in Digital Media and Communication at King's College London, and the co-organiser of the Radical Open Access Collective.

By Laura Gibbs

The advent of open access to scholarly work online plus other open educational resources offers all teachers a great opportunity to re-think course content: the time has come to start thinking about course libraries instead of course textbooks. We can now free ourselves of the old textbook model and build course libraries instead. Rather than having the same content for all students in a course, you can make room for students to choose their own materials, browsing your course library to find the materials that best suit their own interests, preferences, and needs. As an example, I'll describe here the Freebookapalooza online library that supports the two courses that I teach — Mythology and Folklore and Epics of Ancient India — at the University of Oklahoma.

The Freebookapalooza is located at Freebooks.LauraGibbs.net. It's just a blog, nothing fancy. Each book has a blog post of its own, with a linkable address. For each entry, I provide basic information about the book (author, title, etc.), along with a link to online source(s), plus the table of contents. The table of contents is there to help students decide just how useful the book might be, and it's also a big help for searching. I try to include an image of the book cover and/or an illustration from the book or, if the book is not illustrated, an image related somehow to the book's contents. When I started the Freebookpalooza in 2015, I put 1000 books on the virtual shelves; I now have close to 1700 books. It's an endless project, especially now that new books are entering the public domain again in the U.S. every year.

As the semester begins, students explore the Freebookapalooza, and the wide range of content helps them to expand their expectations for what they might learn in the class. I organize the books by geographical area, and there is also a search feature. In addition, I can use labels to create custom "collections" based on specific interests. For example, when students want to learn about Hawaii, I have this link — bit.ly/MFHawaii — ready to go. Each semester, I create new collections like this on the fly as I respond to specific student interests.

The Freebookapalooza contains mostly public domain books that I find at Hathi Trust or at the Internet Archive, along with some more specialized sources such as the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature at the University of Florida. In addition, I have found many useful monographs published by Open Book Publishers, University of California Press, and others. I teach General Education courses, which means that not all of the students are seeking a scholarly research adventure. At the same time, I do have some students every semester who are eager to take things to the next level, and these monographs are exactly what they need.

I've found that students value highly the click-and-go access of online books, which are available at all hours of the day and night. Our university library has great hours, but it's not open at 2AM when, indeed, some students are doing their schoolwork. Given a choice between an older public domain book that is one click away online versus a newer book that they can get from the library, my students usually choose the online option, and not just at 2AM. In addition to the convenience of online access, digital books are a boost for those readers who (like me) need extra large fonts, or readers who want/need text-to-voice audio. And for research purposes, being able to search digital texts is extremely useful.

So, if you are thinking that you would like to curate a library of resources for your students, I'd recommend talking to your campus librarians to see what options they can recommend. My university's library is a hub both for open scholarship (find out more at SHAREOK.org) and also for open educational resources. We even have an "Alternative Textbook Grant" to help instructors shift from traditional textbooks to online resources and/or library-based materials. Since 2014, the Alternative Textbook program has saved University of Oklahoma students over three million dollars in course materials. To find out more, visit Guides.OU.edu/atg (OU Alternative Textbook Grant).

I started using public domain books back in 2002 when I began teaching online; it was slim pickings then, but now with each passing year there are more and more full-text books online, both public domain as well as books with Creative Commons licenses or otherwise free to read online. So, just start browsing and bookmarking materials for your own course library (Open Access Week is the perfect occasion!), and very soon you'll have lots of books and other resources to help connect each student with the content they want to read.

Laura Gibbs has been teaching online courses at the University of Oklahoma since 2002. She is also the author of several Latin textbooks available at SHAREOK.org. Her website is MythFolklore.net.

By Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra

Walking the cities of the world, we can see two types of urban landscape. The first one is structured by pavements complemented by community-beaten, unpaved tracks that residents are actually using to reach their goals. In the second type, there is no such disharmony. Instead, we can see that the walkways were designed by observing which tracks people use, and only then paving those, or else by keeping an eye on whether the paved routes still provide the best service for everyday traffic.

In this post, I wish to point out that in present-day scholarly communication, we suffer from a similar sort of dysfunctionality to that present in the first type of landscape. What follows are casual wonderings about how to prevent scholars having to duplicate their walks on both paved and unpaved paths; what are our chances of better aligning the paved and unpaved routes, or, in other words, what are our options to reduce the gap between established, ‘paved’ practices of scholarly communication and actual, evolving research practices? My thoughts are situated in the contexts of arts and humanities research, but similar phenomena are surely present in other disciplines as well.

Why scholars go off-track

The major tension that probably drives more and more scholars to go off-track and experiment with novel means of disseminating their research lies between the inherent, extreme diversity in present-day knowledge creation practices, versus the relative rigidity of the regular publishing mechanisms that have been shaped by the printing press. Clearly, while legacy forms, classic book and journal publication and their digital simulations are and will remain perfectly suitable for certain forms of scholarship, an increasing number of scholars are struggling to communicate their research results in ways that truly align with their digital research workflows. In an arts and humanities context, this is especially true for scholars working with Digital Humanities methods and tools, or with formats such as the digital scholarly edition. These are important for the scholarly community, but they cannot fit in the boxes provided by conventional units of scholarship.

The real beauty of  efforts to bring innovation to scholarly communication is that they stem naturally from the realities of research and from its continuous advancement. For instance, even if such contributions remain out of the scope of a conventional publication record, scholars will still continue to explore the most innovative ways of creating digital editions or archival research guides. This is simply because making cultural resources available in digital and structured formats is a prerequisite for present-day arts and humanities research and is also an important scholarly activity in itself. Similarly, mediating scholarship through rich multimedia: videos, virtual exhibitions, interactive or even immersive technologies such as VR; using newly emerging narrative tools such as forking history, research notebooks or elegant data visualizations built on the top of scholarly databases; or sharing well-documented codes on gitHub or GitLab, make it far easier for scholars to uncover complete epistemological processes and allow others to interact with their scholarship in-depth, to reuse parts of it or even to build new things on top of it. All these innovations offer great advantages to scholars seeking to communicate their research more vividly and comprehensively and thereby improve the quality of their work.

If research realities stray from the prescribed formats, why, then, are scholars still driven back to the paved pathways?

In the light of all the possibilities inherent in these newly emerging, fit-for-research dissemination practices, it seems much less self-explanatory why scholars must still turn back at a certain point, to double the length of their walk by travelling along the paper-centric publishing routes that cannot always fully accommodate the wealth of their scholarly work.

The answer, as we all know, lies in the ways in which research is transformed into capital (symbolic or literal) in present-day academia. As Martin Paul Eve puts it in his recent preprint, Violins in the Subway: Scarcity Correlations, Evaluative Cultures, and Disciplinary Authority in the Digital Humanities:

“Digital humanists find, time and time again, that they are expected to perform twice the labour of traditional scholars; once for the work itself and once again for its evaluation.”

Journal and book publications still well-serve as long established, standardized units of scholarly outputs that easily recognised by research assessment panels, especially if published in prestigious publication venues with long traditions. Within such an assessment process, which is severely constrained by proxies that reward only certain publication types and brands, the novel digital scholarly objects that organically grow out of present-day research practices will remain simply by-products.

This forces us to face a quite unsettling gap between the realities of research in the digital era and the realities of of the research evaluation system. That is, while maintaining a classical and prestigious publication record seems to be an essential prerequisite for scholars to continue their work, the innovative dissemination practices mentioned above are essential for the well-being and advancement of scholarship itself.

This situation results in many bizarre and anomalous scholarly communication episodes, which we can observe day by day: such as authors’ witty meta-reflections on the often multi-year-long publication processes and the simultaneous advancements in their field between submission and publication, or the struggle of tenure-track candidates to fit all their scholarly production into a thick paper dossier.

Such examples clearly indicate the split between publication practices and the practices of actual communication that allow immediate online availability of research results, swift responses to current events and interactivity with the reader. Such real-time exchanges often get crowded out to GitHub repositories, blogs, academic Twitter, and other informal communication spaces, which yet remain invisible for the purposes of research assessment.

Luckily, and importantly, this situation doesn’t fully prevent all the exciting practices associated with open access and research innovation. Experimental book publications and enhanced monographs provide us with a range of examples to illustrate how long forms of scholarship can be expanded to accommodate multimedia, interactive maps, 3D visualizations, data -- basically, anything arts and humanities scholars work with. For instance, by linking back to primary resources, we can transparently show where the source is, where our enrichments or arguments start, what are the potential ambiguities in the materials -- all of these open a much broader window on our fields of inquiry. Some of the bolder experiments are really pushing the boundaries of what we can conceive as the scholarly monograph and transform it into living scholarship that dynamically develops even after publication. The production of such works is a long way from being available on a mass scale, not only because of  financial or infrastructural constraints, but also because of the relative lack of an evaluative culture around them.

What are our chances of better aligning the paved and unpaved routes, and turning the current landscape into a place that works for all kinds of scholarship?

1. Breaking the vicious circle of research evaluation and empowering emerging evaluative cultures around innovative forms of scholarship

Paving those routes that the different disciplinary communities actually walk, while also opening them to the public, is admittedly a complex task. One key step towards reducing the gap between recognized formats of scholarly communication, and innovative research practices, would be to empower emerging evaluation cultures around such practices.

At the Digital Scholarly Editing: Theory, Practice, Methods conference (October 2016, Anvers, Belgium), Anne Baillot opened her talk with the following lines:

“Imagine if you were to stop being first and foremost a scholar for a little while in order to take a job in which you could do something that would be useful not just to your personal career, but to the whole scholarly community. What would be the focus, what would seem most useful to you?”

Asking (from time to time) the exact same question of disciplinary communities would certainly end by efficiently paving the way towards pilot frameworks for the appropriate crediting of new contribution types that are relevant to their activities. Still, as we see, the need for a cultural shift in research evaluation is currently stuck in a vicious cycle. As long as scholarly communication practices are trapped by research evaluation criteria that are dominated by the prestige economy, such community-driven innovations and efforts will remain strongly disincentivised. As a result, they will not grow sufficiently to inform research organisations, funders and policy-makers about alternative proxies that could replace the current harmful system. One way to break this vicious cycle would be to achieve synchrony by incentivizing scholarly communities to invest into such new certification systems and, on the other hand, incentivizing their institutions and funders to listen to them and trust them.

2. Collectively investing in ‘safe places’ for scholarship

However, scholars are not only exposed to systemic impediments inherent in the current evaluation proxies; they are also dependent on the infrastructure that determines where their work is published, stored, disseminated and preserved. Their connection to and involvement in the development of collectively maintained public services, networks and platforms that embrace new modes of production is therefore crucial: it empowers them to seek a path that suits their own research questions and practices, rather than following the routes set by the legacy formats.

Developments in research infrastructure can create such ‘safe places’ for scholarship. This broad term covers:

• Trustworthy publishing infrastructure and mission-driven academic publishers, funded by academic libraries or other crowdfunding mechanisms, such as the Open Library of Humanities, Open Book Publishers or OpenEdition (see below);
• Community-formed support networks around them such as RadicalOA and ScholarLed;
• Collective institutional investments into preprint services like Humanities Commons  and research data services like Dataverse that institutions alone could not maintain;
• Solutions and capacity-building for sustaining living forms of scholarship and preserving access to data, software and other types of project outputs  (see DARIAH’s contributions below);
• Publicly funded infrastructures for supporting new forms of knowledge creation, for the professionalization of publishing practices or improving the discoverability of a wide range of scholarly content types, for example, the COPIM project. In the SSH domain in Europe this need is fulfilled by the OPERAS research infrastructure.

Enabling scholarly communities to control the infrastructure that they rely on is an extremely complex task, currently facing many structural and organisational barriers. But it is literally instrumental in redefining and reshaping the scholarly communication landscape into one where disciplinary communities have a say in which roads should be paved.

DARIAH’s contributions to an innovative and open publication culture in the arts and humanities

• Provides training and advocacy to arts and humanities researchers (see e.g. the DARIAHOpen blog).
• Offers its communities the use of the HAL publication repository. HAL was developed as a French national resource; it is now open to international users.
• Within the same platform, Episciences supports the emergence and development of overlay journals, namely Open Access electronic journals taking their contents from preprints deposited in open archives such as arXiv or HAL.
• Fosters access to OpenEdition, the French publishing Open Access portal dedicated to humanities and social sciences publications. It maintains and develops three Open Access platforms: OpenEdition journals, OpenEdition Books for Open Access monographs and the multilingual blog portal Hypotheses.
• DARIAH hosts and sustains scholarly communication environments that are important for humanities communities, such as TextGrid (DARIAH-DE) and CENDARI.
• Experiments with new forms of scholarly communication and community evaluation via the OpenMethods metablog.
• DARIAH is a cooperating partner of OPERAS, the European research infrastructure for open scholarly communication in the SSH domain. This partnership allows DARIAH to contribute to infrastructure-building through the HIRMEOS, OPERAS-P and TRIPLE projects.
• DARIAH is committed to its role of making the voice(es) of arts and humanities research communities heard at the European policy level.
• Together with a range of other research infrastructures, DARIAH has built the Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud.

Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra works as the Open Science Officer of DARIAH-EU where she is responsible for fostering Open Science across DARIAH and its cooperating partners by contributing to the design and implementation of Open Science policy statements, guidelines and services related to the open dissemination of research results in the Humanities. She received her PhD in Cultural Linguistics and also has a background in scholarly communication. She tweets at @etothczifra and blogs at https://dariahopen.hypotheses.org/.

By Ashley Farley

‘What is right is not always popular, and what is popular is not always right’ - Albert Einstein

This thought of Albert Einstein’s, to me, embodies the current state of the open access movement - a movement that has been slow in becoming popular. It has brought to light questions concerning the status quo of traditional academic publishing and its effects upon knowledge creation and dissemination. This very questioning is critical in changing the system for the better.

The theme of this year's Open Access Week -- ‘Open for Whom? Equity in Open Knowledge’ -- uses the framework from the previous year, which also addressed the importance of equity, and puts the focus on a more action-oriented goal which ensures open knowledge systems are designed with equity at their core, not merely as an after-thought or “nice to have”.

I am grateful that ScholarLed has provided me with the opportunity to more broadly share my thoughts on systems that sustain open access scholarship. I recognize that I possess the privilege that comes with being a white cisgender woman who works at a prestigious institution. I hope that I can use my voice to highlight critical issues and speak for those who cannot.

While working on the open access policy and implementation at a large foundation, I have been invited to many discussions on this topic with various stakeholders who play a role in the ecosystem, such as publishers, researchers, librarians and other funders. In light of these discussions, I find that when we talk about knowledge systems, and change within these systems, the barriers are not of a technical nature, but relate to human behavior or cultural norms, such as the ‘publish or perish’ paradigm, reliance on flawed metrics, or incentivization. It is more complex to break down these types of obstacle and to create a more equitable landscape, in large part because to do so would challenge inherent power structures. In discussions with traditional publishers* I am hearing a repeated message that is getting louder: a call for all stakeholders to move forward collectively and to end any "infighting". On a surface level this makes sense; however, when we begin unpacking this request, we can see how it glosses over the inequities of existing power imbalances within the status quo. It requires those advocating for change to operate by the rules of those in power and often demands concessions that slow progress (for example the creation of hybrid journals, preprints, and green open access). While all of these are important moments of cultural change, I would argue that they are “workarounds” to prop up the existing system and avoid a much-needed overhaul to better meet the goals of an open system.

When I think about what it will take for an open system to be most successful and effective, I feel it is imperative to ensure that system be built on two elements: Trust and Transparency. Without substantive work on these I fear that new innovations, or adaptations of current systems, will replicate and further entrench inequity. Mission statements and PR campaigns can only go so far; the open community needs to see real action in mission alignment and the realization of the values that this community is built upon. In order for the community to assess whether a system or group is acting in accordance with these values, there must be healthy levels of trust and transparency. Moving forward in these discussions, I consistently work to deploy the steps below to ensure partnerships and systems that can best serve the open community:

• Look at documentation: Thoroughly inspect the documentation provided by a potential partner or system. Bonus points if these are publically available. If not, ask, “why not?” Do their actions align with the mission statement? Does the roadmap indicate that the values of the open community will be well served and sustained? What is the business model and who stands to be most affected by this model both positively and negatively? Always read the fine print.
• Consider past performance: How have the individuals/group behind the system interacted with the open community in the past? What prior actions could be indicators of future service? Has there been a visible record of growth towards embracing and supporting an open community?  It is unlikely that a company or system that has prioritized profit in the past will embrace openness or lower profit margins in the future.
• Question everything: Don’t be afraid to ask tough questions or to require more transparency when needed. Ask questions that delve deeper beyond the messaging to avoid potential “open washing”. If you are able, look at prior financial reports or appropriate tax forms.
• Connect with your open community: To me the most valuable aspect of working in Open has been creating meaningful connections with the open community. There are many individuals willing to share their experience and expertise with you. Reach out for a “gut check” before collaborating with or using a system.

These steps are the beginnings of a movement towards having more trusting and transparent conversations about open systems. I believe this is an important foundation upon which to build. The more the open community declares their values and needs, the more the ecosystem will shift. If not, we face the risk that open systems will be co-opted by or become rife with the inequities we are aiming to eradicate from the current system. It is my hope that we are on the right track toward a future in which knowledge dissemination is maintained by the very community that created it. No longer will it be outsourced, unsustainably, to those who do not have the best interests of this community built into their core. It may not be popular at the moment, but it is the right thing to do.

*It is not my intention to make generalizations about all publishers. There are various positive and negative actors in the ecosystem. However, I think that the data speaks for itself as to which are the current most powerful players who will affect how the open community acts in this ecosystem.

Ashley Farley is an Associate Program Officer of Knowledge and Research Services at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In this capacity she focuses on the foundation’s Open Access Policy’s implementation and associated initiatives. This work has sparked a passion for open access, and she believes that open knowledge has the power to improve and save lives.

By Yasmeen Shorish and Leslie Chan

The theme for 2019’s Open Access Week, “Open for Whom,” prompts us to ask questions that have been largely ignored in the open access debates. Instead of focusing on the usual questions about business models and licensing options, we would like to draw attention to questions on scholarly infrastructure and its governance. Infrastructure comprises systems and social practices that reflect the values of its creators and, ideally, those who interact with it. Infrastructure, we contend, is never neutral but involves contest over power. Infrastructure not only determines how we access and who can access information, but whose voices count as “legitimate” scholarship.

Whose perspectives and ways of knowing are valued in the current knowledge infrastructure and whose are silenced? Whose priorities are being inscribed in scholarly communication infrastructure and how do those priorities reflect global and local considerations? Who has the power to set the agenda and governance decisions on infrastructure design, and who are subjugated by the conditions prescribed by the tools and standards embedded in current infrastructure? How do issues of gender, race, class, and other marginalized positionalities intersect with the politics of infrastructure?

The open movement is increasingly recognizing that these questions about equity are critical for scholarly communications and for the design of knowledge infrastructure projects in particular.[1] Yet, we continue to operate in a landscape where these considerations have become largely depoliticized and decontextualized, driven in large measure by the dominance of a handful of powerful multinational publishers. Having consolidated the journal content through horizontal integration,[2] they are now busy enclosing the research infrastructure with a “vertical stack” approach.[3] Recognizing that there are more profits to be made from analytics and “research intelligence” in the current data-driven environment, the big five (Reed-Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, and Sage) are busy building end-to-end platforms, integrating once disparate journal production workflows, research tools, data services, and researcher profiles. This is done with the aim of extracting vast quantities of data that would allow them to develop new products and services for the global marketplace of metrics, analytics, and university rankings.[4]

Prioritizing analytics and dashboards through such a unified and monolithic platform for authors and institutions may appear to be an efficient system. It crunches a variety of inputs (articles, authorship, data, funding, workflow) and provides a single output for individual and institutional assessment and evaluation. But in that drive for efficiency, implicit value statements have been asserted by the infrastructure providers. Biases in language preference, research areas, publication venue, methodologies, modes of presentation, and even “excellence” have become “standardized” and reinforced as if there is only a single “universal” set of practices. As Death and Gabay[5] noted “techniques of measuring, indexing, benchmarking and auditing are not themselves neutral but are rather deeply political ways of inscribing a particular view of the world – most frequently a neoliberal world of competitive states and entrepreneurial individuals amenable to rankings and zero-sum market exchanges.”

A clear example is the reward structure of the globalized academy, which incentivizes publications in “top-tier” journals signified by their impact factors and publisher’s brand. This structure leaves very little space for independent journals, publishers and scholarship outside of this norm; particularly scholarship of local importance and not considered to be “mainstream.” Such a monolithic system has been effective in colonizing the world of knowledge, and allowing powerful institutions and corporations in the Global North to continue their dominance, while further deepening the asymmetrical hierarchy and epistemic divide in global scholarly communications.

To reverse this growing trend, we assert that the most promising way forward is to turn our support to autonomous, community-governed local initiatives, and by providing a network of solidarity for truly diverse and inclusive scholarly communication. An example is the recently formed Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project, intended to resolve some of the most pressing barriers preventing small publishers from interfacing with large-scale organisations and processes.[6] Often, conversations of open scholarship are dominated by issues in journal publishing and cost structure. This effort serves as a reminder of the many infrastructure barriers and issues that still exist for independent book publishers, and the importance of collectively maintaining infrastructures that are governed and sustained by communities for the purpose of co-creating and sharing knowledge as a common good, across myriad formats.

On a regional level, AmeliCA brings together more than 24 institutions from seven Latin American countries to co-create an open, non-commercial infrastructure for Latin America and other Global South journals. In response to the encroachment of commercial publishers from the North, the lack of recognition by the dominant systems of assessment of science, and the exclusion of most journals from the region due to language, the coalition calls for the development of cooperative strategies where the various stakeholders of scientific communication support, recognise and sustain Open Access that reflect the region’s diverse contexts.[7]

In alignment with this ethos, the Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) project has set out to develop a framework for collective support of independent and institutionally-based infrastructure initiatives that in the past struggled to stay afloat or ended up being acquired by one of the big players. IOI is built upon the premise that we need a different set of conversations about infrastructure and its governance and to ensure that the collective infrastructures are well nourished, stay healthy, and are resistant to enclosure. By creating a network of cultural and disciplinary approaches and regional systems, and by leveraging the formidable social infrastructure and knowledge embedded in the research community from around the world, the goal is to construct a pluriverse[8] of scholarly communications.

To reframe our priorities in this way requires collective will and coordination across regions and institutions to build new kinds of support for resource reallocation. It further requires institutional courage and political will to declare that open, autonomous, and equitable systems are preferred over “prestigious” Euro-centric research systems that continue to undermine other epistemic communities from around the world. It requires that disciplines and societies prioritize who they have been centering in their research, whose voices they’ve been amplifying, and whose they have been silencing. Supporting the status quo while leaving initiatives that reflect epistemic diversity and knowledge equity as second-tier priorities will result in continued entrenchment of status quo inequities and the marginalization of truly innovative, equitable systems.

There is urgency to this work, especially as some funders have become motivated to intervene in the “market” of scholarly publishing. We have an opportunity to break from the colonialist foundations of our scholarly communication infrastructure and remake our systems to be more accurate representations of humanity’s collective knowledge. To do anything less is to be complicit in intellectual oppression and cultural erasure.

Leslie Chan is an Associate Professor and Associate Director of the Centre for Critical Development Studies, University of Toronto Scarborough. Leslie has a long standing interest in the role of openness in the design of scholarly infrastructure and in how infrastructure could support knowledge equity and epistemic inclusion.

Yasmeen Shorish is an Associate Professor and the Data Services Coordinator at James Madison University. Her research focuses on scholarly communication and issues related to representation in librarianship.

[1] See for example the OpenCon series of gathering, and the OpenCon diversity report, https://sparcopen.github.io/opencon-dei-report/; a great example is also the recent Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute on Equity in Scholarly Communication, https://trianglesci.org/2019-institute/

[2] Larivière, V., Haustein, S., & Mongeon, P. (2015). The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era. PLOS ONE, 10(6), e0127502, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502

[3] Hinchliffe, L. (2018). Advancing an Integrated Vertical Stack of Publication Services? The Scholarly Kitchen. Retrieved October 12, 2019, from The Scholarly Kitchen website, https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/08/08/integrated-vertical-stack-of-publication-services/

[4] Chen, G., Posada, A., & Chan, L. (2019). Vertical Integration in Academic Publishing: Implications for Knowledge Inequality. In L. Chan & P. Mounier (eds.), Connecting the Knowledge Commons—From Projects to Sustainable Infrastructure: The 22nd International Conference on Electronic Publishing – Revised Selected Papers. Retrieved from http://books.openedition.org/oep/9068

[5] Death, C., and Gabay, C. (2015). Doing biopolitics differently? Radical potential in the post-2015 MDG and SDG debates. Globalizations, (12)4: 597-612.

[6] The announcment of this new initiative is here: https://blog.scholarled.org/copim-announcement/

[7] For more details about the coalition, see http://amelica.org/index.php/en/about/#quienes-somos

[8] The term Pluriverse refers to the idea that multiple worlds could co-exist, with a multiple of epistemic traditions and intellectual divesity enriching each other. See Escobar, P. A. (2018). Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press.

by Mark Turin

The theme for Open Access Week 2019 is ‘Open for Whom? Equity in Open Knowledge’, a topic that runs through much of my research and increasingly shapes my teaching.

The issue of whose voices are represented—in print, online or on air—by whom and for whom, is particularly salient for under-represented and historically marginalized communities. Communities of colour and Indigenous peoples have more often found themselves to be objects of scholarly interest and academic scrutiny rather than recognized as co-creators of the research and equal partners in the publishing projects that follow. The phrase ‘Nothing About Us Without Us’—while historically associated with disability inclusion and empowerment—has greater relevance than ever, and offers us an opportunity to rethink how we share information in this digitally connected world.

For Indigenous communities in North America and beyond, the institutional momentum behind open access imperatives risks infringing (and even violating) long-held cultural protocols about who should be privy to certain forms of information and traditional knowledge, and when and how these are to be shared. The First Nations principles of OCAP®—Ownership, Control, Access and Possession—are important standards that all of us working in cultural heritage need to study with care.

Local Contexts, an innovative initiative that supports Native, First Nations, Aboriginal, Inuit, Metis in Canada and Indigenous communities the world over in the management of their intellectual property and cultural heritage—specifically within a digital environment—has crafted a series of Traditional Knowledge licenses and labels that move the conversation beyond one-size-fits-all Creative Commons models.

Such ideas are not just ‘good to think with’; they are being operationalized by communities and scholars in highly original ways. From 2012-2017, with funding from the Virtual Museum of Canada, the Stó:lo Research and Resource Management Centre worked together with the Scowlitz First Nation, Ursus Heritage Consulting, the Making Culture Lab at Simon Fraser University and a diverse team of archaeologists, software developers and designers to produce an extraordinary exhibit entitled ‘Sq’éwlets: A Stó:lo-Coast Salish community in the Fraser River Valley’. In this multilingual and culturally-rich online space, the Stó:lo community make powerful use of customized Traditional Knowledge labels and specify that ‘our community chose the labels used on this site in order to help site visitors to understand and respect our knowledge and cultural heritage.’

By locating Indigenous knowledge and voices at the center of such work and being more aware of the responsibilities that such sharing entails, scholars, technologists, library staff and publishers are asking complex and necessary questions about how open access functions when it comes to managing and disseminating sensitive cultural content.

As a case in point, my own university recently launched RavenSpace, ‘a model of publishing that embraces collaboration, respects Indigenous protocols, and uses digital tools in imaginative ways to make knowledge accessible and shareable across communities and generations.’ Founded by UBC Press and developed with the participation of the University of Washington Press and partners, the first publication in the series is a beautifully rebuilt, digital edition of the award-winning As I Remember It: Teachings (Ɂəms tɑɁɑw) from the Life of a Sliammon Elder, the print edition of which was published just a few years before.

Advances such as these will—I hope—help to disrupt the public perception of humanities scholarship and publishing as still fundamentally single-authored, print-monograph-driven, library-based and typically uncollaborative. While open access discussions in the sciences focus mostly on journal publishing—and the financially and psychologically coercive models this can generate—the arts, humanities and social sciences have different needs, goals and constraints when it comes to open access.

One of the most enduring challenges remains educating colleagues, some of whom remain deeply invested in traditional models of knowledge production and reproduction, and are curiously unconcerned or uninterested about what other opportunities might exist. Many have heard horror stories of rapacious and predatory commercial publishers dressed up in open access clothing, and are understandably reticent about engaging. Others express lingering concerns about the prestige and scholarly standing of open access models. Needless to say, the wider availability of a peer-reviewed publication in no way compromises its quality and academic integrity.

A fair number of scholars are still oblivious to the true costs associated with book and manuscript production. Those of us involved in open access publishing initiatives in the humanities need to do better at explaining the complex financial realities involved in what is referred to—in the ever more scrutinized and neoliberal operating environment of Canadian universities—as ‘knowledge mobilization’.

Open access is not free: there are ongoing costs associated with all aspects of the endeavor. And as the examples I’ve outlined here illustrate, there is also no reason why open access needs to be all or nothing. Guided by the values and intellectual goals of the communities with whom we have the privilege of working, scholars in the humanities and social sciences are better positioned than ever to create respectful partnerships and build adaptive platforms that help to collect, protect and connect cultural knowledge in ways that are more responsible, ethical and sustainable.

Mark Turin is an anthropologist and linguist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and a member of the Editorial Board and Advisory Panel of the Cambridge-based Open Book Publishers. For 2019-2020, he is a Wall Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. He tweets @markturin.

by Vanessa Proudman

The Vision

Everything we have gained by opening content and data will be under threat if we allow the enclosure of scholarly infrastructures. We propose a set of principles by which Open Infrastructures to support the research community could be run and sustained.
– Geoffrey Bilder, Jennifer Lin, Cameron Neylon

The scholarly communication community needs to call for an open, sustainable infrastructure that is community-owned — one that speaks to our open and academic values. It must be open; not closed off by vendors creating a situation where the academy becomes dependent on a suite of products that are likewise dependent on essential infrastructure, often built by the academy in the first place. For this to truly work and to offer a viable and sustainable solution, we need to develop an interconnected rich and diverse ecosystem of open infrastructure where many flowers bloom upon which a plethora of for- and not-for-profit services can be built.

Imagine a future ten years from now where Open is the default, enabled by an open scholarly infrastructure that follows principles of Open as published by Cameron Neylon et al in 2015 or by COAR and SPARC in 2019. A world where the community is involved in the good governance of infrastructure, where services and infrastructure follow open standards such as open APIs and open source; where content, metadata and usage stats are made openly available, and where we have transparent pricing and contracts. Open Infrastructure is motivated by a drive for research excellence and open values rather than profit-making. This happens when communities of stakeholders fund and sustain this infrastructure, including the academy as a whole and its libraries, government, funders, learned societies, publishers, service providers and individuals. When institutions provide operational funding, this support extends beyond financing innovation, acknowledging successful projects that have continued to provide value to their communities over the years and rewarding them with funding for operational costs. Valued, tried and tested infrastructures that need a financial boost to bring them onto a more healthy footing have also been enabled through initiatives like SCOSS. This involves a new strategic vision of what needs to be funded and how it will be enabled by initiatives like Invest in Open Infrastructure, with new kinds of business models for the mid- to longer term. This will form the basis for a new, transparent, trustworthy and equitable scholarly communication society.

For this to take place, and to succeed, ten pre-requisites are called for:

1. Develop a scholarly infrastructure landscape that promotes diversity, one that is more co-ordinated; a commons.
2. A balance of power needs to exist, since more infrastructure must be shared and built upon together, developing Alfred Marshall’s idea of the industrial district where both collaboration and competition thrive.
3. Engage and model on existing scholarly communication infrastructure networks to build a healthier connected ecosystem that integrates and works.
4. Establish a solid understanding of the academy, funding, and infrastructure offering in order to identify needs, lessons learnt, and contexts to develop a successful strategy for funding infrastructure.
5. Streamline not-for-profit infrastructure back-offices so that they are able to manage administrative processes, marketing and other challenges more easily and more efficiently.
6. To fund infrastructure, Open Research policy matches with practice so that infrastructure acquires the funding it needs. Funds are made available for scholarly infrastructure through more national Open Research or Open Science funds, as seen in France, for example.
7. Consolidate more funding streams among and across stakeholders to reach infrastructure goals more rapidly.
8. Make scholarly infrastructure a fixed budget line for ministries, funders, the academy and its libraries, for learned societies, and service providers.
9. Simplify payment mechanisms for those who wish to fund and for those who acquire funding.
10. And, last but not least, consistently collaborate regionally, nationally and internationally for a global solution to sustain scholarly infrastructure.

This post is based on a speech given at the 2019 OASPA Conference in Copenhagen on 26 September 2019.

Vanessa Proudman is Director of SPARC Europe; she is responsible for developing and implementing SPARC Europe’s Strategic Plan. She is working to make Open the default.

ScholarLed – comprising Mattering Press, meson press, Open Book Publishers, Open Humanities Press, and punctum books – was founded in 2018 as a collective of non-profit, open access book publishers in the Humanities and Social Sciences who share a commitment to opening up scholarly research to diverse readerships, resisting the marketization of academic knowledge production, and working collaboratively rather than in competition. This includes developing systems and practices that allow presses to provide each other with forms of mutual support, ranging from pooled expertise to shared on- and offline infrastructures. Collectively, we are seeking powerful, practical ways for small-scale, scholar-led open access presses to grow and flourish in a publishing landscape that is changing rapidly. We believe publicly-funded research should be openly available to a global readership, without technical or economic barriers. ScholarLed is concerned to build infrastructure for smaller-scale OA book publishers that would prioritise the needs of the creative research community and the values of public research institutions against those for-profit entities who seek to privatise (and also homogenize) knowledge.

We are therefore delighted to announce that, on June 14, Research England confirmed it will award £2.2 million to fund a project explicitly designed to address the need for such open infrastructures.¹ ScholarLed will be a key partner in the project, titled Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). It is designed to transform open access book publishing by moving away from a model of competing commercial service operations to a more horizontal and cooperative, knowledge-sharing approach. COPIM will be funded from the Research England Development (RED) Fund, which supports innovation in research and knowledge exchange in higher education that offers significant public benefits. The project will be led by Coventry University, with Gary Hall and Janneke Adema of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures serving as co-PIs. Other key project leaders include Sherri Barnes (UCSB Library), Gareth Cole (Loughborough University Library), Joe Deville (Lancaster University and Mattering Press), Martin Eve (Birkbeck, University of London and Open Library of Humanities), Rupert Gatti (Trinity College, Cambridge and Open Book Publishers), and Eileen Joy (punctum books). Key institutional and organisational partners include Birkbeck, University of London; Trinity College, Cambridge; Lancaster University; University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) Library; Loughborough University Library; Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB); Jisc Collections; and the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC).

ScholarLed, representing researcher-led and community-minded open access book publishers whose operations are distributed around Europe, the UK, the US, and Australasia, is committed to global collaborations around the collective stewardship of open access and to removing structural and organisational barriers to innovation in the open books landscape, especially in the Humanities and Social Sciences. This is something that cannot be achieved by any one organisation, but should ideally involve the full range of actors and stakeholders invested in a more progressive and equitable future for scholarly communications. For COPIM, this includes scholar-researchers, publishers, universities, infrastructure providers, membership organisations, university libraries, and research funders, all working together to ensure a more democratically equitable scholarly communications landscape.

COPIM comprises 7 work packages that are rooted in the firm conviction that, in order for open access publishing initiatives to thrive, we have to develop more robust definitions of “open” that go beyond releasing content from behind paywalls. It pilots a range of interventions, from developing open, transparent, sustainable, and community-governed infrastructures for the curation, dissemination, discovery, and long-term preservation of open content and open data, to following the best practices for integrating open content into institutional library, digital learning, and repository systems. ScholarLed believes it is vital to ensure that the mechanisms used by open access publishers are driven by, and responsive to, the varied needs of an international scholarly community, and a key aspect of COPIM is that it privileges close working relationships between publishers, librarians, and other knowledge managers.

As part of seven interconnected work packages, COPIM aims to:

• build capacity among open access presses, enabling them to work better together to address the practical and political challenges of open access while also increasing the production of content at scales that are sustainable;
• create new funding channels for open access book publishing, including devising new consortial funding models designed to maximize the ability of libraries to directly support open access publishers and content that best serves the needs of their highly-localized constituencies;
• pilot diverse business models for open access publishing, with the aim of reducing the dependence of publishers on author-facing book processing charges (BPCs) as well as to better facilitate new open access publishing start-ups;
• help publishers reduce their operating costs by introducing new infrastructures and forms of collaboration focused on maximizing workflow efficiencies through the use of open source tools and open protocols;
• develop new open access community governance models that will be supportive of the needs of a valuably diverse and hybrid community of open access publishers;
• enable open access books to be better integrated into universal research systems valued by libraries and other research-intensive organisations, including repositories and digital learning environments;
• innovate and experiment with the content of open access books, with a special focus on promoting engagement with experimental forms of research, including exploring the potential for the re-use of existing open access content;
• build stronger architectures for archiving complex digital book publications, to include associated data and multimedia content; and
• facilitate knowledge transfer to various stakeholders to ensure that COPIM’s technical, organisational, financial, and relational innovations will scale both horizontally (to other presses) and vertically (to other partners, including universities, libraries, and funding agencies).

COPIM will demonstrate the richly productive synergies of non-competitive collaboration that scholar-led, open book publishing can facilitate. This major strategic international partnership brings together the strengths of established scholar-led presses—well-known for the crucial role they have already played in the development and promotion of OA monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences—with the long-standing expertise of key institutional partners. It is only when publishers, librarians, and other knowledge managers work together, non-competitively, that a truly open, community-owned ecosystem for open access books can be realized. With Invest in Open Infrastructure, ScholarLed works on behalf of “a world in which communities of researchers, scholars, and knowledge workers across the globe are fully enabled to share, discover, and work together.”

“COPIM is an exciting opportunity to push for open infrastructures, for community-led governance, and for the realignment of relations between not-for-profit institutions in the realm of monograph publishing. It will support the sustainable publication of open access books, delivering major improvements and innovations in the infrastructures, systems, and workflows being used by open access book publishers and by those publishers making a transition to open access books.”

~ Janneke Adema, Coventry University & Open Humanities Press

“This represents something of a watershed moment for open access book publishing. I and my colleagues have long been arguing that diverse scholarly communities should be at the forefront of developing the practices and infrastructures urgently needed to deliver an inclusive and sustainable future for open access. This grant brings that future much closer by creating new partnerships between the increasing number of academics, like me, who are directly involved in open access publishing, and university libraries, infrastructure providers and membership organisations. Collaborations like this are essential to ensure the research produced in and beyond universities reaches the very widest audiences.”

~ Joe Deville, Lancaster University & Mattering Press

“This award comes at a crucial time for open access book publishing: there is growing recognition of the need to create open, community-controlled infrastructures to support OA monograph publication internationally. COPIM will enable us to build the systems and structures that allow diverse, small-scale scholarly publishing initiatives to flourish. Collectively the ScholarLed presses have now published over 500 books, and expect to publish over 80 new titles in the coming year. COPIM prepares the ground for more such presses to thrive, increasing the strength and heterogeneity of open access publishing within a robust, inclusive and community-managed publishing ecosystem: Scaling Small.”

~ Rupert Gatti, Trinity College, Cambridge & Open Book Publishers

For more information about COPIM or to learn more about ScholarLed, please contact us at info[at]scholarled.org.

1^ The exact RED Fund award amount for COPIM is £2,202,947.68. COPIM project members have contributed a further £614,830.