The theme of Open Access week this year is “Community over commercialization”.
Across the next seven days, the Research and Scholarly Communications Team in the University Library Services will share with you some initiatives that aim to transform scholarly publishing and move away from the for-profit publishing that has largely dominated academic publishing.
Theme 3 - Path to Open – JSTOR and publishing monographs
As Open Access (OA) is becoming more prevalent, new models of funding publishing are starting to emerge.
Path to Open is a pilot programme to find a new sustainable way to fund Open Access monograph publishing. Indeed, one of the barriers to OA is to rethink the business model whereby presses and publishers make money out of the sale of journals or books to one in which they can still flourish without these. It also aims to address the challenges faced by libraries that find that their book and serials budgets are not sufficient to buy the content needed for either students or researchers.
This initiative aims to support small and medium university presses and to provide libraries with affordable access to high quality frontlists OA books. Presses such as Liverpool University Press, Manchester University Press and Bristol University press are part of the programme and more are signing up.
Participating libraries contribute by paying a subscription fee to the pilot programme. In the UK this subscription fee has been negotiated through JISC. In return JSTOR supports the participating university presses to produce high-quality open access monographs. The pilot is set to last three years over which they plan to publish 300 titles every year. The first 100 titles have been released to participating libraries. For the duration of the pilot, only participating libraries will have access to the books. After the first three years, these titles will be fully open access on the JSTOR platform.
In this model, the role of libraries evolved from being guardians and providers of information to participate in the production of the scholarly record.
As authors, have a look at the list of university presses already part of the programme and think about whether they might be a good fit for your next book.