In recent years, it’s become increasingly apparent that while the open access movement promises to make scholarship free to read, it doesn’t guarantee research and publishing processes will be affordable or equitable.
It’s critical for scholarly organizations to guide the creation of OA research development and dissemination approaches to ensure they serve the best interests of academia and the public. One of the primary ways many are doing this is by launching OA journals and flipping existing titles to OA via community-led publishing models, thereby promoting healthy market pressures in the mixed ecosystem of corporate and not-for-profit players.
Since Scholastica’s founding in 2012, we’ve remained committed to empowering scholarly organizations of any size to publish top-quality journals sustainably. We see our role as providing highly efficient and affordable peer review, production, and content dissemination software and services publishers can use together or with external solutions to create complete toolkits for operating journals aligned with their needs and values — including opening access to research. Of course, software is only one part of realizing that vision. It also requires the formulation of viable long-term business models and community support structures.
In this blog post, we consider how scholarly organizations are developing toolkits for sustainable OA publishing and steps Scholastica is taking to help facilitate the many possible paths forward — because we believe the best publishing solutions promote flexibility and the freedom of choice.
Progress toward community-focused OA models
While corporate consolidation of scholarly journals has increased in recent years, not-for-profit publishers have also taken steps to strengthen their positions in the marketplace and promote sustainable OA models.
Small and medium society and university press publishers are increasingly piloting OA initiatives focused on expanding equity in research, developing strategies to reduce publishing costs, experimenting with new revenue streams, and improving the services they provide authors and readers. As discussed in this recent Scholastica blog post, examples include new:
- Subscribe to Open (S2O) pilots
- Frameworks for Gold OA article processing charge waiver funds
- Transformative Agreement models
- Subsidized Diamond OA journals
There has also been a new wave of cooperative publishing infrastructure and funding introduced, such as:
- The Scholarly Publishing Collective: launched by Duke University Press in 2022, the Collective aims to give its members access to publishing resources that would otherwise be cost prohibitive
- shift+OPEN: an initiative to provide funding and support to flip established subscription journals to Diamond OA publishing models started by The MIT Press in 2023
- The Society Publishers’ Coalition: launched in 2019, the Coalition aims to unite scholarly societies that publish independently and those publishing with corporate partners
Where are we now?
The OA movement has progressed via a combination of carrots and sticks. As initiatives like OA Week help educate communities about the benefits of opening access to research, government and funder requirements such as Plan S and the OSTP Nelson Memo are adding pressure for scholars and publishers to walk the walk. These combined forces have the potential to expedite an industry-wide shift toward OA publishing. But they’ve also raised concerns about small publishers’ levels of preparedness for a primarily OA research landscape, such as those expressed by the Association of American Publishers in a statement on the Nelson Memo.
Delta Think’s 2022 market consolidation report offered an encouraging outlook, finding that “smaller publishers now publish a significantly greater share of output than they did 20 years ago. The largest publishers appear to have less share. So, extreme though the consolidation may appear to some, it’s not as great as once it was.” The report concludes, “only time will tell, of course, but we wonder if consolidation will pick up again and the reversal of patterns last year is the beginning of a new trend.”
However, as discussed by David Crotty in his 2023 Scholarly Kitchen article “Quantifying Consolidation in the Scholarly Journals Market,” consolidation is occurring nonetheless, and the push for open access could result in further corporate mergers if small publishers are unable to carve out viable paths forward. In a 2021 precursor to that piece, Crotty argued the primary drivers for market consolidation are:
- Uncertainty leading many small publishers to seek “stable” partners
- Cost and complexity of managing bundles
- Technology and reporting demands
In a way, all three issues could be boiled down to the last one — small publishers’ need for better technical solutions. At Scholastica, we’re focused on making the technology piece of the puzzle easier to enable independent small and medium academic publishers to bench above their weight and meet the same standards as corporate players at a fraction of the cost.
How Scholastica is working to support sustainable OA publishing: 2024 update
Scholastica has the privilege of working with many academic organizations publishing fully OA journals, such as those highlighted in our “How We Open Knowledge” blog series for OA Week 2021 as well as our new series on building engaged OA journal communities for OA Week 2024.
We now offer a full suite of publishing software solutions to support academic organizations in the earliest stages of journal development, as well as mature small and medium publishers working to scale their portfolios. In line with our vision for a democratized scholarly communication landscape, we’ve purposely built out our software and services to keep small and medium publishers in control of their operations and destinies, with:
- No long-term contracts: Scholastica offers transparent standard pricing (available on our website) with no long-term contracts for any of our software and services. We believe in earning customer loyalty every day.
- Modularity: We’ve purposefully made Scholastica’s products modular — meaning they can be integrated together or used individually in conjunction with other solutions. So publishers can choose the best-of-breed software stack for their unique needs without worrying about vendor lock-in.
- External workflow integration support: In recent years, we’ve also been working to help publishers connect to external publishing tools and services as needed, including connecting the Scholastica Production Platform with Silverchair to support publishers using that hosting provider, like UC Press, and introducing the ability to export files from the Scholastica Peer Review System to an external production or hosting service via an FTP server.
- Expanding integrations with industry partners: We’ve also continued building integrations with leading industry partners, including indexes like the DOAJ and PubMed Central, the arXiv (with an overlay publishing integration), and research integrity tools like Crossref Similarity Check. Stay tuned for future updates in this area!
- No setup or training fees: Scholastica does not charge for software/service workflow configuration, unlike other systems, and we offer training and unlimited support for all users at no additional cost.
- No production minimums: We don’t require publishers to have a minimum number of articles per year to use the Scholastica Production Service, so whether a journal publishes 500 articles or five they can receive the same professional PDF and full-text XML typesetting.
As an independent company owned and operated by the original co-founders, Scholastica continues to chart our own course, and we remain committed to empowering small and medium publishers to do the same.
At this time, when there is so much misinformation out in the world, International Open Access Week (happening right now!) is a reminder that making reliable scholarly outputs readily available is more critical than ever. At Scholastica, we’re proud to be doing our part to support sustainable OA publishing and we think the future is bright.
