On 22nd September I’ll be participating in a panel on funding and business mechanisms for equitable open access for the 2020 OASPA conference. I’ll be using the opportunity to discuss some of the projects I’m involved in – notably the Radical Open Access Collective and the Community-led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project – in order to highlight the different approaches to business models and sustainability that these projects may entail. In particular, drawing on my recent work with Janneke Adema, I will be discussing ‘scaling small’, an organisational philosophy that seeks to build resilience within scholarly publishing through mutual reliance and collaboration. Scaling small is an approach that preserves the locality and (biblio)diversity of approaches to publishing while encouraging presses to work together on shared technical, infrastructural and other publishing projects. Predicated on an ethic of care, in direct opposition to the cookie-cutter economies of scale preferred by the larger commercial publishers, scaling small intends to nurture cooperation (over competition) as a sustaining force for global scholarly communication. I’ll be discussing the opportunities and potential drawbacks of this approach for a more ethical and equitable ecosystem of open access scholarly publishing.
The panel is on Tuesday 22nd September at 5pm BST and will feature the following other participants:
- Vivian Berghahn Berghahn Books, UK
- Sharla Lair LYRASIS, USA
- Alexia Hudson-Ward Oberlin College and Conservatory, USA
- Chair: Charles Watkinson, University of Michigan, USA
You can register for the meeting here: https://webforms.copernicus.org/OASPA2020/registration (I’m told the registration fee can be waived if you do not have funding).