Scholarly Publishing Collective: For Librarians and Vendors

“In 2021, Duke University Press (Duke UP) announced a partnership with several nonprofit scholarly journal publishers and societies to provide journal services including subscription management, fulfillment, hosting, and institutional marketing and sales in a collaboration called the Scholarly Publishing Collective.

Electronic content for publications hosted under this program will migrate to the Scholarly Publishing Collective’s platform, managed by Duke UP and powered by Silverchair. Silverchair also hosts Duke UP’s books and journals in the humanities and social sciences at read.dukeupress.edu. The platform will launch in 2022 and Duke University Press will begin accepting renewal orders for the 2022 subscription year in July 2021….”

Duke University Press – Duke University Press now offering journal publishing services to nonprofit scholarly publishers

“Duke University Press is pleased to partner with nonprofit scholarly journal publishers and societies to provide journal services including subscription management, fulfillment, hosting, and institutional marketing and sales in a collaboration called the Scholarly Publishing Collective (SPC).

Beginning in 2021, the SPC will provide subscription management and fulfillment services, in partnership with Longleaf Services, to Cornell University Press, Texas Tech University Press, and the University of North Carolina Press. The SPC online content platform will launch in 2022, hosting journals and fulfilling digital access on behalf of Michigan State University Press, Penn State University Press, the Society of Biblical Literature, and the University of Illinois Press….”

Open Access Community Investment Program Pilot

“How do libraries, consortia, and other scholarly publishing stakeholders decide what open access (OA) content to invest in when divesting from paywalled content? In the emerging OA publishing market, stakeholders must consider thousands of OA publications, while often lacking sufficient data relevant to their own values or the pros and cons of each opportunity. This one-off nature of OA investment is not conducive to easy administration or participation. Vetting and procurement processes become onerous as programs increase. While the scholarly publishing community has a great willingness to work together to support OA efforts, we need a stronger, more effective connection infrastructure to sustainably transition to OA. 

 
LYRASIS, TSPOA, and Duke University Press have developed this Open Access Community Investment Program Pilot (“Pilot Project”) to test the viability, scalability, and sustainability of infrastructure, a criteria-based vetting mechanism, and outreach to help match funding entities or potential investors with publishers or journals seeking funding to publish open access. These potential investors encompass the range of scholarly publishing stakeholders, including for example: libraries, consortia, and funders, academic centers/departments, and cultural institutions. The term “stakeholders” as used throughout this document references this range of potential investors. While the initial set of open access initiatives or programs will be U.S. based, the community of investing stakeholders is expected to be global….”

 

Open Access Community Investment Program (OACIP)

“The LYRASIS Open Access Community Investment Program (OACIP) is a community-driven framework that enables multiple stakeholders (including funders, institutions, libraries, authors, and editors) to efficiently and strategically evaluate and collectively fund open access content initiatives. The program is designed to:

Facilitate an experimental incubation space for emerging open access funding and business models;

Centralize the administration and funding of open access initiatives or programs at multiple scales and make transparent to the community at large who is participating in each investment community.

Provide a funding hub for more bespoke programs, output from smaller publishers, and niche scholarly output to maintain diversity of scholarship.

Enable investors to make principled, data-driven spending or reinvestment decisions and strategically fund individual programs or distribute funds to multiple programs that align with their missions all in one place, increasing efficiencies and convenience….”

Announcing the Open Access Community Investment Program – Transitioning Society Publications to OA

“We are thrilled to launch the Open Access Community Investment Program, a community-funded open access publishing project developed by LYRASIS, Transitioning Society Publications to Open Access (TSPOA), and Duke University Press.

Our goal is to help match libraries, consortia, and other prospective scholarly publishing funders with non-profit publishers and journal editorial boards that are seeking financial investments to sustain or transition to open access publishing of journals or books. We mean prospective funders broadly, to encompass the range of scholarly publishing stakeholders, including for example: libraries, consortia, and funders, academic centers or departments, and cultural institutions. …”

Cooperation and the Creation of a National Emergency Library – UNC Press Blog

“In the context of the unprecedented challenges associated with the spread of COVID-19, many of you will have read about an effort from the Internet Archive (IA) to launch a “National Emergency Library” (NEL). Essentially, the NEL was an effort to create unlimited access to digital editions of books in their collection. At a time when physical libraries were closing, this ambitious effort to open up content that had been previously limited or subject to paywalls was both praised and criticized.

At our presses we had already agreed to allow open digital access to our scholarly collections. At UNC Press, we opened our book collections in platforms like Project MUSE, Books at JSTOR, Ebsco, and ProQuest. Duke University Press offered free platform access to digital collections of books and journals to requesting libraries through June 30, 2020. Over 200 libraries have taken Duke up on this offer. Duke University Press opened up content to the public in several timely syllabi, including Navigating the Threat of Pandemic and Care in Uncertain Times. These arrangements had been made through dialog and discussion with those vendors who sought our perspective and permission.

The NEL was different in that the IA acted unilaterally and blurred legal arguments with extra-legal (read: emergency) justifications. This ignored the agency that authors and publishers legally and conventionally exercise. And as our colleague Karin Wulf from the Omohundro Institute wrote, it ignored the systems that invest in the production of these books.

After IA acted unilaterally in creating the National Emergency Library, we criticized the effort and presses began the process of withdrawing titles. However, after a conference call with the leadership of the IA and many university press directors, we realized our two presses shared many of the same goals of the NEL, but we simply disagreed with the process by which the main goal was being achieved.

After this conference call, we subsequently opened a separate line of communication with the IA and we’re pleased to announce that within a few days, we created a one-page Statement of Cooperation to allow our university press titles to participate in the NEL….”

Duke University Press – Response to COVID-19

“We are extending grace access for content hosted on both of our platforms (read.dukeupress.edu and projecteuclid.org) through the end of May for our existing customers.

As courses transition to online, we can provide 90 days of complimentary electronic access to course materials. Contact orders@dukeupress.edu. 

We are partnering with EBSCO and ProQuest to allow multi-user access through mid-June to all e-books purchased on their platforms. Read ProQuest’s statement.

We would like to share our reading lists, which offer free content (included is Navigating the Threat of Pandemic).

We provide remote access options on both of our content platforms. If you would like to set this up, please contact our Customer Relations team at orders@dukeupress.edu. …”