EIFL Open Access Programme Manager Iryna Kuchma has been invited to join the Advisory Board of the new Open Access Publishing Cooperative Study.

The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) announced the launch of the Open Access Publishing Cooperative Study, a two-year initiative, on July 1, 2015.

Working in collaboration with the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and other stakeholders, the initiative will explore the feasibility of establishing publishing cooperatives that bring together libraries, journals, scholarly societies, presses, and others, as a financially sustainable open access model for peer-reviewed scholarly publishing.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is providing a grant to support the project.

‘WE NEED A MODEL THAT CAN SERVE ALL FIELDS OF RESEARCH’

“Now that we have widespread acceptance of open access to research and scholarship, we need to carefully assess ways of transitioning from subscription-based to open access publishing,” said John Willinsky, Khosla Family Professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, Professor (Part-time) in Publishing@SFU, and PKP Director.

“While Article Processing Charges work for well-funded research, we obviously need a model that can serve all fields of research and the cooperative has the advantage of building on the shared goals, existing collaboration, and current funding of libraries, journals, and societies,” he added.

The MacArthur Foundation grant will be devoted to:

• gathering financial data from journals and libraries to establish current investment levels in professional quality publishing;

• consulting with stakeholders – research libraries, scholarly journals, scholarly societies, presses, funding agencies, and others – about perceived gains and risks of a co-op approach to open access funding, governance, and structure; and

• developing and assessing open source cooperative publishing infrastructures for running pilot studies to evaluate the impact on scholarly and public quality of this approach to open access publishing.

If the results of the first three stages show sufficient promise, the Open Access Publishing Cooperative Study plans to hold a culminating ‘constitutional assembly’ for stakeholders in scholarly publishing.

The assembly will apply what has been learned in the study to forge the principles and structures by which such cooperatives might constitute a means of bringing about sustainable and global open access to research and scholarship.

For more information: Kevin Stranack, Project Manager, Public Knowledge Project, kstranac[at]sfu.ca