scholarly journals Towards a sustainable Open Access monograph publishing workflow for academic institutions

Author(s):  
Antonia Schrader ◽  
Alexander Grossmann ◽  
Michael Reiche

Across the world, there is a growing interest in Open Access (OA) publishing. Therefore, OA publishing has become a trend and is of key importance to the scientific community. However, observing the publication landscape in Germany leads to a striking finding of very different approaches. In particular, OA book publishing is still in relatively early stages, leading to OA books being much less frequently published than OA journal articles. However, although well-established publishers offer the publication of OA books, only certain researchers can actually publish, because of high Book Processing Charges (BPCs). In contrast to such publishers, university presses publish books as OA without any or at significantly lower charges; however, university presses are often inadequately staffed and do not have the technical know-how of the state-of-the-art publishing of OA books possessed by well-established publishers. For these reasons, our research project aims to develop an ideal and transferable publication workflow for OA books that is both cost-effective and personnel-efficient as well as media-neutral to enable universities to publish their publications as OA. To this end, a one-day meeting with stakeholders of the publication landscape was held in June 2018 at the University of Applied Science in Leipzig, Germany. During the meeting, the stakeholders were asked to present their views on the current situation and also the lessons learned and the shortcomings of the existing approaches. As a result, the observation was confirmed that the publication landscape is very heterogeneous and that there are no standardised interfaces and no harmonised practices for publishing OA books. Furthermore, in a discussion with the stakeholders during the second part of the meeting, further various issues of OA book publishing were revealed that have to be considered. Additionally, the various challenges and wishes of the stakeholders could be classified into five topic areas. These findings illustrate that the primary task of the research project has to be the analysis of the existing publishing workflows and abstracting generally valid processes that are needed to publish OA books. Additionally, the further issues of OA book publishing, mentioned by the stakeholders, have to be addressed during the development. The five topic areas will help reduce the complexity of this project.

Author(s):  
Antonia Schrader ◽  
Alexander Grossmann ◽  
Michael Reiche ◽  
David Bohm

A draft (final version) of an media-neutral as well as both cost-effective and personnel-efficient publications workflow for Open Access (OA) monograph publishing at university presses is presented. The workflow has been developed as a result of the research project Open-Access-Hochschulverlag at the Leipzig University of Applied Sciences, Germany. The aim of the project is to develop a sustainable and adoptable workflow to enable universities to publish their publications as OA and printed books simultaneously in a state-of-the-art way and without any restrictions regarding the license, the variety of formats, print run etc. Up to now, we have defined 17 process groupswith up to 9processes,which a university press has to consider when publishing OA books state-of-the-art. These processes have been shown on the poster (it is the final version of the project, two preliminary versionswerealready published in April and June 2019). The arrangement and the arrows between the processes indicate in which order the processes should be ideally organised by the university presses. Since any university may adapt that workflow individually, it includes several possible ways by which an OA book can be published (see process group Ka or Qe at the poster). The visualisation of the publication workflow represents only a part of the results of our research project. In addition detailed descriptions for each process have been created, which explain a certain process in depth, e.g. who is responsible for it, what time it takes and what it may cost to complete the process. These detailed descriptions will be published elsewhere.


Author(s):  
Antonia Schrader ◽  
Alexander Grossmann ◽  
Michael Reiche ◽  
David Bohm

Adraft (second version) of an media-neutral as well as both cost-effective and personnel-efficient publications workflow for Open Access (OA) monograph publishing at university presses is presented. The workflow has been developed as a result of the research project Open-Access-Hochschulverlag at the Leipzig University of Applied Sciences, Germany. The aim of the project is to develop a sustainable and adoptable workflow to enable universities to publish their publications as OA and printed books simultaneously in a state-of-the-art way and without any restrictions regarding the license, the variety of formats, print run etc. Up to now, we have defined 18 main processes (in green) with up to 8 sub-processes (in orange) which a university press has to consider when publishing OA books state-of-the-art. These processes have been shown on the poster (it is the second veersion of the workflow draft - the first version was published on25th April 2019). The arrangement and the arrows between the processes indicate in which order the processes should be ideally organised by the university presses. Since any university may adapt that workflow individually, it includes several possible ways by which an OA book can be published (see process 1 or 3 at the poster). The visualisation of the publication workflow represents only a part of the results of our research project. In addition detailed descriptions for each process have been created, which explain a certain process in depth, e.g. who is responsible for it, what time it takes and what it may cost to complete the process. These detailed descriptions will be published elsewhere.


Author(s):  
Antonia Schrader ◽  
Alexander Grossmann ◽  
Michael Reiche ◽  
David Bohm

A first draft of an media-neutral as well as both cost-effective and personnel-efficient publications workflow for Open Access (OA) monograph publishing at university presses is presented. The workflow has been developed as a result of the research project Open-Access-Hochschulverlag at the Leipzig University of Applied Sciences, Germany. The aim of the project is to develop a sustainable and adoptable workflow to enable universities to publish their publications as OA and printed books simultaneously in a state-of-the-art way and without any restrictions regarding the license, the variety of formats, print run etc. Up to now, we have defined 20 main processes with up to 12 sub-processes which a university press has to consider when publishing OA books state-of-the-art. These processes have been shown on the poster. The arrangement and the arrows between the processes indicate in which order the processes should be ideally organised by the university presses. Since any university may adapt that workflow individually, it includes several possible ways by which an OA book can be published (see process 1 or 3 at the poster). The visualisation of the publication workflow represents only a part of the results of our research project. In addition detailed descriptions for each process have been created, which explain a certain process in depth, e.g. who is responsible for it, what time it takes and what it may cost to complete the process. These detailed descriptions will be published elsewhere.


Author(s):  
Antonia Schrader ◽  
Alexander Grossmann ◽  
Michael Reiche ◽  
David Bohm

The poster is an overview of the research project Open-Access-Hochschulverlag (in english Open Access University Press), that is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF, Germany) for 23 months (Start in May 2018). Open Access (OA) book publishing is still in relatively early stages, leading to academic books being much less frequently published OA than research journal articles. This has various effects on the publication landscape, which are described here. Despite established publishers meanwhile also offer the publication of OA monographs, only certain researchers can actually publish, because of high Book Processing Charges (BPCs) up to 10,000 USD and more. In contrast, university presses have started to publish monographs as OA without any or at significantly lower charges; however, university presses often do not have the technical know-how of the state-of-the-art publishing of OA books possessed by academic publishers. This is why, our research project aims to develop an sustainable and easy-to-adopt publication workflow for OA monographs, which is media-neutral as well as both cost-effective and personnel-efficient. Universities shall be enabled to publish their book publications as OA by adopting this workflow. In addition, first results and an outlook ahead to the further steps of the research project are depicted on the poster.


Publications ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 49
Author(s):  
Mariana Cernicova-Buca ◽  
Katalin Luzan

In the context of the 2020 public health crisis that discourages exchanges of physical objects in society, university-led publishing needed to rethink its operations. Worldwide the opening of quality scholarly content proved to be a solution. University presses reacted rapidly and offered books according to the open access model. The present research aimed to map the editorial landscape of Romanian university presses, to identify the main features displayed online by the university presses parented by public universities and to highlight the readiness of these players to further open access academic books, especially in the time of the COVID-19 crisis. The quantitative approach investigated the availability of e-books in the university presses’ portfolios, including the alignment to the open access scholarship movement, the use of social media accounts to promote the presses and the response of the presses to the challenges of the health crisis. Out of the 46 active university presses, only six had open book titles in their portfolios and only one genuinely responded actively to the challenges posed by the need for electronic formats in 2020. Unless Romanian university presses modernize and restructure their modus operandi, they can prove irrelevant in the post-crisis period.


2015 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 76-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Somaly Kim Wu ◽  
Heather McCullough

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to presents the very recent development of e-journal publishing services at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Charlotte. In 2011, the J. Murrey Atkins Library at UNC Charlotte created a new unit in the library, the Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL), which partners with faculty and graduate students in the use of digital and networked research tools to create, disseminate and store new knowledge. E-journal publishing and hosting are among the suite of services offered by the DSL, and we currently publish three journals (https://journals.uncc.edu/). Design/methodology/approach – This report provides an overview of the context of our library’s decision to begin publishing journals, including a discussion of our university’s becoming more research-intensive, our university system mandating increased efficiencies and sharing research with the state citizens, and the library’s own goals of raising awareness of and supporting open access. Also outlined are the technical and procedural choices made, important activities undertaken to develop, define and publicize the new services, campus response to the service and next steps. Findings – This report provides detailed accounting of how a large academic library implemented an electronic publishing service to support open access scholarship. Important activities such as marketing communication, policies development and technical/procedural activities are defined and results described. The report provides observation and lessons learned for academic libraries in development and support of electronic journals. Originality/value – Library as the publisher is a new concept. This report will be of interest to many libraries who are considering offering publishing services and to libraries that currently offer publishing services.


2021 ◽  
Vol 82 (3) ◽  
pp. 129
Author(s):  
Stephanie L. Gross

The director of libraries conceived of Yeshiva University’s institutional repository (IR) in 2018 in part as a cost-effective alternative to Digital Measures, a scholarly productivity tracking program used to determine faculty eligibility for tenure. It was mandated in Yeshiva University’s first Strategic Plan 2016-2010, under Strategic Imperative 2: Advance Faculty Development and Excellence in Teaching and Research. The IR would be a secure, prestigious, university-sanctioned platform for showcasing, documenting, and sharing intellectual output across the globe. It was important that most of the work would be open access, with accompanying Creative Commons Non-Commercial No-Derivatives licenses. In addition to faculty, undergraduate and graduate students would be given a platform to self-archive their intellectual output. Both faculty and students would have the option to opt-out from making their work public, or at least limiting the visibility to the university public only.


Author(s):  
Arthur Jason Boston

In March 2021, the University of California and Elsevier announced a new transformative deal which included slightly-discounted article processing fees as UC's route to open access in Elsevier journals. Librarians and researchers expressed immediate concern that this deal upheld inequities in the research system. The UC/Elsevier transformative deal, however, is just one of many that include expensive pay-to-publish structures. This commentary proposes an alternative contract between libraries and publishers that would enable wider reading and lower costs, called Read & Let Read. The three main points of a Read & Let Read deal include a half-dollar valuation of individual journal articles, prepayment on a university’s estimated usage, and an equal payment made for usage outside of the university. If a Read & Let Read deal were implemented at UC, UC would pay a slightly higher amount of money to Elsevier than they are expected to at present, and would not flip any articles to open access. Instead, they would contribute toward a more equitably-distributed system of scholarly readership.


Author(s):  
Ruth Wilkinson

The following paper describes an action research project which was carried out with a class of second-year students following the Degree of English Philology at the University of Castilla la Mancha. The aim of the project was to raise students’ awareness of the need to be less dependent on their teachers and to provide the reflective and interactive scaffolding necessary to enable them to take greater responsibility for their own learning. The current paper describes the measures taken, and how students reacted to this process. It concludes by examining the lessons learned and by proposing a number of guidelines to be taken into account when attempting to promote autonomy in a similar context.


Publications ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Taylor

Managing a New University Press (NUP) is often a one-person operation and, with limits on time and resources, efficiency and effectiveness are key to having a successful production process and providing a high level of author, editor and reader services. This article looks at the challenges faced by open access (OA) university presses throughout the publishing journey and considers ways in which these challenges can be addressed. In particular, the article focuses on six key stages throughout the lifecycle of an open access publication: commissioning; review; production; discoverability; marketing; analytics. Approached from the point of view of the University of Huddersfield Press, this article also draws on discussions and experiences of other NUPs from community-led forums and events. By highlighting the issues faced, and the potential solutions to them, this research recognises the need for a tailored and formalised production workflow within NUPs and also provides guidance how to begin implementing possible solutions.


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