Bibliodiversity in Practice: Developing Community-Owned, Open Infrastructures to Unleash Open Access Publishing

Lucy Barnes · Rupert Gatti

19 citations0/0 files storedInternational Conference on Electronic Publishing

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Publishing and Scholarly Communication Library Science and Information Academic Publishing and Open Access

Abstract

Academic publishing is changing. The drive towards open access publishing, which is being powered in the UK by funding bodies (SHERPA Juliet), the requirements of REFs 2021 (UKRI) and 2027 (Hill 2018), and Europe-wide movements such as the recently-announced Plan S (‘About Plan S’), has the potential to shake up established ways of publishing academic research. Within book publishing, the traditional print formats and the conventional ways of disseminating research, which are protected and promoted by a small number of powerful incumbents, are being challenged. Academic publishing, and academic book publishing, is at a crossroads: will it find ways to accommodate open access distribution within its existing structures? Or will new systems of research dissemination be developed? And what might those new systems look like?In this article we look at the main features of the existing monograph publication and distribution ecosystem, and question the suitability of this for open access monographs. We look specifically at some of the key economic characteristics of the monograph publishing market and consider their implications for new infrastructures designed specifically to support open access titles. The key observations are that the production of monographs displays constant returns to scale, and so can (and does) support large numbers of publishing initiatives; at the same time the distribution and discovery systems for monographs display increasing returns to scale and so naturally leads to the emergence of a few large providers. We argue that in order to protect the diversity of players and outputs within the monograph publishing industry in the transition to open access it is important to create open and community-managed infrastructures and revenue flows that both cater for different business models and production workflows and are resistant to take over or control by a single (or small number) of players.

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References

2014Open Access and the Humanities 2016The Costs of Publishing Monographs: Toward a Transparent Methodology 2018Collectivity and collaboration: imagining new forms of communality to create resilience in scholar-led publishing 2017Changing Publishing Ecologies: A Landscape Study of New University Presses and Academic-Led Publishing 2017Cost estimates of an open access mandate for monographs in the UK’s third Research Excellence Framework 2017The Surge in New University Presses and Academic-Led Publishing: An Overview of a Changing Publishing Ecology in the UK

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2023Authorship and Publishing in the Humanities 2020The Democratisation Myth: Open Access and the Solidification of Epistemic Injustices 2022The Rise of the Guest Editor—Discontinuities of Editorship in Scholarly Publishing

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