Abstract
The authors, who all have experience with academic publishing, outline the landscape of new university and academic-led open access publishing, before discussing four interrelated sets of challenges which are often referred when questioning the viability of such publishing ventures. They are: (1) professionalism, (2) scale, (3) quality, and (4) discoverability & dissemination. The authors provide examples of how, albeit differing in size, form and ambition, these new presses are not just adhering to conventional publishing norms but often innovating in order to surpass them.
Highlights
Our description of the practices of New University Presses’ (NUPs) and academic-led publishers (ALPs) reveals a world of open access scholarly publishing that is making highly diverse contributions to dealing with the various challenges associated with performing professionalism, operating at a small scale, managing quality, and disseminating academic books and making them discoverable
We have shown how many of the skill sets required to produce innovation in publishing, including new sustainable publishing models, are already in existence in these smaller open access publishing initiatives
This work comes at a time of significant potential change in monograph publishing, as we have seen with both Plan S and new country-specific Open Access mandates
Summary
Book publishing stands at a crossroads. Look one way, and observe a path that is broader and more well-trodden, characterised by the continuation of an entrenched publishing system, in which a small number of large commercial publishers are seen by a majority of academics as leading arbiters of quality of reputation, often selling books at a price often only affordable by wealthier academic libraries, and placing similar barriers to access to these same books’ digital incarnations. Towards a narrower path that is gradually starting to emerge from the surrounding context, and see a heterogeneous collection of publishing operations, many of whom are making their work available for free via open access, in which markers of reputation and prestige are built not through techniques of market dominance and the invocation of tradition, but by a broad scholarly community, including academics, universities and libraries This image broadly represents the state of book publishing in the contemporary academy as we see it, as well as two of its possible futures.
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