Tag: Scholarly Communication

Central European University Press Announces Innovative Open Access Funding Model

Posted on by OTH

Central European University Press Announces Innovative Open Access Funding Model

For Immediate Release via Project Muse

Central European University Press

22 October 2020

The Central European University Press (CEUP) announces that it is transitioning to an open access (OA) monograph programme through its new library subscription membership initiative, Opening the Future. The Press will provide access to portions of their highly-regarded backlist and use the revenue from members’ subscriptions to allow the frontlist to be OA from the date of publication. The Press is working with the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project.

Additional partners on the initiative include Project MUSE, as hosting platform for the subscription packages and new OA titles, along with LYRASIS facilitating library membership participation, and with OAPEN for hosting and dissemination of OA titles.

Established in 1993 to reflect the intellectual strengths and values of its parent institution, the Central European University, CEUP is a leading publisher in the history of the region, communism and transitions to democracy. It is widely recognised as the foremost English-language university press dedicated to research on Central and Eastern Europe and the former communist countries. It publishes approximately 25 new monographs and research-based edited collections a year and has a large backlist of over 450 titles with 300 e-books available through several platforms.

CEUP is creating a sustainable OA publishing model that will give members access to a selection of the extensive backlist, DRM-free and with perpetual access after three years. In return, this membership revenue will then be used to make newly-published books openly accessible to anyone. When the revenue target is met and the entire monograph frontlist is openly accessible, future membership fee rates can be lowered. The model has support from LYRASIS who will assist with organizing library participation in the programme and has support from OAPEN. Project MUSE will host the books, providing MARC records, KBART files and supporting discovery systems, and subscribers will have access to COUNTER compliant statistics. Membership is open to libraries and institutions worldwide.

The initiative builds on library journal membership models such as Open Library of the Humanities and ‘Subscribe to Open’ such as being piloted by Annual Reviews, and also on successful book membership programmes such as those at Open Book Publishers and punctum books.

COPIM is an international partnership of researchers, universities, librarians, open access book publishers and infrastructure providers supported by the Research England Development Fund (REDFund) as a major development project in the Higher Education sector with significant public benefits and by Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.

CEUP will be provided with assistance in implementing this model through Work Package 3 of the COPIM programme including documentation of this ‘working model’ as a step towards creating a free, open toolkit and roadmap for other book publishers considering OA.

Frances Pinter, Executive Chair at CEUP said, “We’re pleased to be working with COPIM as this partnership will allow us to not only achieve our goals at CEUP but to also demonstrate a sustainable model that I believe will scale up in ways that provide efficiencies and equity to the benefit of all. I am delighted that Project MUSE, LYRASIS and OAPEN are supporting the project. We’re looking forward to working with many stakeholders to ensure success.”

Martin Paul Eve, Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London, and one of the COPIM project leads, said, “We are looking forward to working with CEUP over the next two years and will be recording our progress through regular blog posts and reports. This case study collaboration will be a keystone in the COPIM project’s future success. We hope that, with the documented success of Opening the Future, we will have a model that could lead to the widespread transition of university presses worldwide to OA.”

“Participating with initiatives such as CEUP’s Opening the Future aligns strongly with our mission to support university presses and other non-commercial publishers in the sustainable, equitable dissemination of scholarship worldwide,” said Wendy Queen, Director of Project MUSE. “We’re excited by the promise of this model to demonstrate a pathway for more publishers to an open future.”

Celeste Feather, Senior Director of Content and Scholarly Communications Initiatives at LYRASIS, said “The Opening the Future model represents a thoughtful and sustainable approach to making CEUP’s scholarly monographs accessible to the widest possible readership. We are enthused about continuing our work with stakeholders in the library community to develop this very promising route to OA.”

Libraries and other institutions can support the move to full gold OA, without author-facing charges. Visit the project website https://www.openingthefuture.net/.

Updates on the case study and details on CEUP’s progress towards OA will be published on the project website www.copim.ac.uk

Notes to editors:

Open Access and the Global South

Posted on by OTH

Open Access and the Global South

by Dr. Sven Fund, Managing Director, Knowledge Unlatched GmbH

Supporting access to scholarly content for researchers worldwide but in particular in the Global South is one of the altruistic arguments mentioned most commonly by librarians and funders in the more economically-developed regions of the world. But that wish alone does not fully address the demands and needs for equitable participation in the global publication and research process. In order to explore this in more depth, Knowledge Unlatched organized a truly global virtual panel within the context of the digital Frankfurt Book Fair. The three panelists invited were Liz Ngonzi, Founder / Executive Director, The International Social Impact Institute at Hunter College, USA; Juan Cordoba from Universidad del Rosario in Colombia, and Abel Packer, the director of SciELO, Brazil. About 30 participants from around the world also joined the conversation which took place on October 16.

It soon emerged that is a truism for all three panelists that there is no such thing as “the” Global South, as conditions vary greatly from country to country and continent to continent. While a number of academic systems in Africa for example still lack very basic technological preconditions to enable scholarship to take advantage of the free resources available, others are well-advanced both when it comes to publishing as well as reading/using open content. While in some countries even top institutions are just starting to familiarize themselves with digital publishing and the concept of openness, others can already look back at several years of experience.

Liz Ngonzi highlighted that there are blocking issues on a number of levels, not just the technical restrictions. Many – particularly authoritarian – governments in the world still restrict access to knowledge, viewing academic freedom on both the consumption as well as the dissemination sides as a threat to their rule.

However barriers also exist on a more individual level, and Abel Packer was able to report from his own experience at SciELO on how important education about available open access models is, as well as individual training in a number of fields. Juan Cordoba, with a strong background in and overview of the scene at Latin American university presses, emphasized the importance of a stable organizational setting. He reported from the experience of his region, where journals and books are often published by libraries directly, thereby providing a cost-efficient alternative to other forms of scholarly publishing.

The panelists agreed that the trend for more collaboration necessitates a better use of digital resources, independent of world region, and it is no surprise that open access is seen as an ideal means to that end. They also unequivocally called for better access to publication opportunities for researchers from less economically-advanced regions (or institutions) around the globe. This entails inclusion in international research contexts as well as better funding opportunities for scholarly projects and academic publishing within the countries of the Global South.

The discussion highlighted the many motivations and facets of open access, not only within one academic system, but more particularly across different types of borders. Be it technical preconditions, funding resources or the issue of different national languages beyond English, as well as research publication traditions in the academic production – open access as a model needs to take all of this into consideration if it wishes to enhance its inclusive nature. Funders and research organizations, libraries and publishing houses have a tool at hand to create a more equitable and better environment, to the advantage of researchers in both the North and the South. All three panelists made it very clear that open access is not a charity or a funding transfer between world regions, but that it does have the power to make the research itself better, provided resources are pooled effectively and viewpoints include more global input.

But at the same time methods must be developed to eliminate the existing boundaries within the respective communities, requiring a shift in mindset alongside the need for more pragmatic solutions.

The panel discussion was recorded and is freely available here: https://openresearch.community/posts/oa-in-the-global-south-video-conference?room_id=frankfurt-book-fair-open-conversations.