Major Initiatives in Transformative Publishing

Why support major initiatives in transformative publishing?

The Library is committed - through its Content Strategy - to the transformation of academic publishing “to allow for ethical, sustainable, open access for all”. Part of this commitment is our desire to financially support Open Scholarship.  

With our sector partners, we negotiate transformational ‘Read-and-Publish’ deals that allow us to leverage our subscription spending for greater open access with commercial publishers. However, these deals have limitations and are not achieving the effect of truly opposing the “restrictive practices and the pursuit of high profits” amongst the major commercial publishers that drives up the cost of research and shuts out researchers from poorer institutions and countries.

Therefore, the Library seeks to create an alternative, community owned publishing landscape by funding open infrastructure and not-for-profit publishing initiatives. We fund - through our Open Scholarship Fund - publishers and partners across a variety of disciplines.

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Jisc Open Access Community Framework (OACF)

Jisc are responsible for the majority of sector-wide negotiations of library resources. They also support diversity in the OA marketplace and help open access publishers. To expand and increase their sustainability, Jisc operates under a free-to-read, free-to-publish model. As such Jisc provides an open access community framework (OACF), working for and with the higher education sector, enabling the UK's academic research community to realise the rewards of open access.

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Open Book Collective (OBC)

The OBC supports publishers working together on the production and sharing of open access books in traditional and innovative forms. They are community-owned and -led. Their aim is to publish works that do not rely on expensive book processing charges and to make them available to a wider reading audience, without barriers.

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Open Library of Humanities

The Open Library of Humanities (OLH) is a diamond open access publisher. This means that they present no barriers to potential authors - i.e. the ability to pay an article processing charge (APC) or the existence of a transformational agreement. OLH seeks revenue through membership, not subscriptions and APCs. We have supported OLH since 2015 and have increased our support as OLH has grown. Their leadership has encouraged others to take the same approach as their diamond-OA model.

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PLoS

PLoS - the Public Library of Science - is a born-open publisher that seeks to make publishing more accessible, in order to make supporting your researchers easier. As such it experiments with a number of different models, and the Library supports these through Jisc. It is our hope that this inclusive approach will create different destinations for publications separate from the legacy publishers.

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Pressbooks & The Open Educational Network (OEN)

As well as supporting OA for research publications, the Library is also committed to the development of Open Educational Resources (OERs), both in terms of the opportunities they represent for teachers and to counteract the inequity of the textbook publishing market. We subscribe to Pressbooks, an authoring and editing tool which enables University staff to develop and adapt open educational resources and we are part of the global Pressbooks community. We are also the first UK institution to join the Open Education Network, a community of practice for the development of OER and hosts of the Open Textbook Library. The OEN supports the wider work we are doing with departments to fund OER creation.