ScholarLed welcomes new member presses: African Minds and mediastudies.press

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.

Collective Funding to Reclaim Scholarly Publishing · Business of Knowing, summer 2021

“The open access movement has dropped barriers to readers only to erect them for authors. The reason is the article processing charge (APC), which typically runs $3,000 to $5,000. The APC model, with its tolled access to authorship, is the subscription model seen through a camera obscura: author paywalls in place of reading paywalls.

Most scholars cannot afford the steep fees, a fact masked by the privileged segment who can: scientists in the rich industrialized world, and scholars in a handful of wealthy European countries and North American universities. The fees are often paid via so-called “read-and-publish” deals, which fold APCs into the subscription contracts that libraries negotiate with publishers.

The emerging APC regime is also re-anointing the commercial oligopolists—the same five firms that fleece universities through usurious subscription charges. Springer Nature, Elsevier, and their peers are, with every read-and-publish deal, transitioning their enormous profit margins from tolled to open—and capturing the lion’s share of library spending in the process. Librarians continue to fund the tolled system, while also—at the richer institutions—picking up the tab for their faculty’s author fees. The result is an incumbent-publisher spending lockdown, one that ratifies the APC regime….

Collective funding is an appealing idea, versions of which have been circulating since at least 2006, with important variations on the theme published since. The challenge is getting the model to work beyond a handful of successful, single-resource experiments (including the ArXiv preprint server, the Open Library of Humanities, and the SCOAP3 particle physics journals, among others). The two main hurdles are coordination and funder participation. The academic communication system involves thousands of funders and hundreds of publishers, which makes for a nightmarish coordination challenge. A related obstacle, one made much worse with lots of actors, is the free rider problem. Fee-free open access is a public good that benefits everyone, even non-payers; if enough libraries opt out, the collective funding scheme is likely to collapse….”

Fair OA publishers, infrastructures and initiatives supported by KU Leuven | KU Leuven Open Science

KU Leuven promotes non-commercial and community-owned approaches of OA, especially through the KU Leuven Fund for Fair OA. On the one hand, the fund supports innovative publishing initiatives and infrastructures. On the other hand, the fund covers membership costs for consortia and advocacy organizations focusing on a non-commercial approach to scholarly communication. On this page you can find an overview of everything that KU Leuven endorses.

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ScholarLed to Pilot Major International OA Publishing Project

ScholarLed – comprising Mattering Pressmeson pressOpen Book PublishersOpen 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….”