Usually, libraries have to purchase individual campus licences to make Open Access publications available. With the crowdfunding-based package model of the Open Library Medienwissenschaft of the Bielefeld-based publisher transcript Verlag, participating libraries can finance the OA provision of entire media studies collections for a fee. The costs are shared among the participants, which greatly reduces the price per institution. The development of the Open Library Medienwissenschaft is part of the project TOAA - Transformational Open Access Approaches, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
Already in the first attempt, transcript was able to win the necessary number of media studies libraries for a new Open Access consortium with the cooperation of the Lower Saxony State and University Library (SUB) Göttingen and the Leipzig Specialised Information Service (FID) for Communication, Media and Film Studies "adlr.link". According to the publisher, the establishment of this consortium is an important step towards ensuring the continued existence of the Open Library Medienwissenschaft beyond the start-up phase financed by the BMBF. With the help of annual crowdfunding by the participating libraries, new titles will be added to the Open Library at least until 2024.
By the end of the funding phase in November 2021, the necessary minimum quorum was even exceeded with 32 full sponsorships, eleven light sponsorships for smaller institutions and a further nine microsponsorships with an annual fixed price. "As a discipline, media studies is extremely OA-friendly, but it is a comparatively small subject with a manageable number of higher education institutions with a manageable number of university locations," says publisher and programme director Dr. Karin Werner in a press release from the publishing house. "We are now all the more pleased that our efforts have paid off right away and that our project has received so much tailwind from a broad spectrum of universities, universities of applied sciences and other institutions!"
As part of the Open Library Medienwissenschaft, a growing collection of quality-checked, media studies content from the transcript programme will be made available to the entire academic community in open access. Following the founding of the consortium, the publisher is now working on the establishment of an editorial board, which will be responsible for quality control and title selection for the Open Library Medienwissenschaft in the future.
Publication in the Open Library Medienwissenschaft is free of charge for authors. According to transcript, this means that all authors in the subject community - regardless of their institution's funding - have the opportunity to publish their work in Open Access.
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