Five experts from the Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Universitätsverlage (University Presses Working Group) have presented the position paper Open access transformation for books: the role of institutional presses and publication services. The paper follows the current debate on scholar-led open access publishing infrastructures for books. It focuses on fields of action in which research institutions should expand and establish a professional and commercially independent OA publishing infrastructure.
Scope for institutional publication offerings
In the field of OA journals, there are already business and publication models that are primarily contested by the commercial publishing industry, whereas corresponding models in the book sector and related funding strategies and processes are still in their infancy. At this point, the authors of the position paper see an opportunity for research institutions to establish themselves as infrastructure providers for OA books. To this end, the paper recommends the further professionalisation of the institution's own publication infrastructure – repositories, preprint servers, institutional publication services and science publishers – to create a holistic publication offering through the involvement of the public sector in the interests of researchers.
Academic institutions have a duty for OA transformation
The five authors from the University Presses Working Group see it as the duty of academic institutions to play a more active role in the implementation of a sustainable and financially viable OA transformation of books. To this end, they name four concrete fields of action for academic institutions:
- development of sustainable publication services in the sense of OA and open science
- networking and transfer of knowledge among scientific institutions
- guaranteeing the independence of institutional publication services from commercial partners
- to establish institutional publication services as high-quality alternatives to commercial publication channels.
Read the complete position paper "Open access transformation for books: the role of institutional presses and publication services" by the authors Ursula Arning, Margo Bargheer, Isabella Meinecke, Dagmar Schobert and Regine Tobias here: https://zenodo.org/record/6346271