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.