Sustaining OA with Publishing Cooperatives

Kevin Stranack

Open access publishing continues to grow around the world, with a variety of economic models emerging to provide sustainable funding for the production and dissemination of high quality, peer-reviewed publications. Although author processing charges have become increasingly common, particularly in the health and natural sciences, some groups are experimenting with cooperative structures where key stakeholders, including libraries, societies, publishers, funding agencies, and others come together to collectively fund and support publishing activities. This session will report on the MacArthur-funded Open Access Publishing Cooperative Study, which is investigating the viability of publishing cooperatives through an examination of pilot projects in Africa, Canada, and the United States.

All Growed Up: Preparing Gold Open Access Journals for a Post-Incubator Life. Some lessons on transitions and new beginnings.

Daniel O'Donnell

The Lethbridge Journal Incubator has been supporting Gold Open Access humanities journals for almost five years. This year, several journals are preparing to "leave" the incubator and join an external publisher while two new journals are under consideration for inclusion. This paper reviews the Incubator's unique approach to financing Gold Open Access publication in light of these transitions. How well prepared were our journals for their transition to a "real" publisher? How has the transition affected workflow, training, and the value for investment received by our stakeholders? What in retrospect would we have done differently as a training initiative? As a publisher? As a developer of Journals? And finally, how are the new journals we are considering adding to the incubator similar or different from out initial stable of titles?

OA Monographs: The Cost of Creating Them Today, to Make Them Open for Tomorrow

Nancy Maron

What would it take to make scholarly monographs available via Open Access? Some publishers are already experimenting with different approaches, from the library-funded model of Knowledge Unlatched, to the University of California’s Luminos imprint. For those publishers considering it, a first step is understanding what it costs to create a high-quality, peer-reviewed digital monograph today. This was the question addressed in a Mellon-funded study in 2015, as researchers from Ithaka S+R gathered data from 20 AAUP member presses to examine the full range of costs involved in creating, producing and disseminating monographs today.

Author Nancy Maron will present the findings from this study and share highlights from related studies that explored implications for university-funded OA publishing efforts. In addition, the study authors are now taking the methodology and creating a Digital Monograph P + L, a tool that other publishers will be able to use to estimate the full publishing costs for themselves. This session will allow ample time to discuss the implications for publishers and libraries, and to encourage feedback on the Digital Monograph P+L.