Publishing cooperatives: An alternative for non-profit publishers

Abstract

Publishing cooperatives — owned, controlled, and benefiting non–profit publishers — would provide an organizational and financial structure well suited to balancing society publishers’ twin imperatives of financial sustainability and mission fulfillment. Market challenges and structural constraints often render it difficult for small society publishers to compete individually. Publishing cooperatives would allow society publishers to remain independent while operating collectively to overcome both structural and strategic disadvantages and to address the inefficiencies in the market for academic journals. Publishing cooperatives can provide a scaleable publishing model that aligns with the values of the academy while providing a practical financial framework capable of sustaining society publishing programs.

Open Access Article Processing Charges: DOAJ Survey May 2014

“…Edgar and Willinsky [12] suggested this could be perceived as an indication of a renaissance of scholar-led publishing. This distribution also fits the pattern for scholarly journal publishers overall described by Crow [17]. This is very similar to the findings of Thompson ([18], p. 63], who found through a major study of scholarly monograph publishers in several English-speaking countries, a tendency towards concentration and larger publishers combined with a healthy system of very small publishers, but not much in the middle.…”

“…The skewed distribution of publishers by OA APC title size may be worthy of examination as an indication of a potential future problem with market concentration in the OA APC market, similar to market concentration in subscriptions journals as described by Crow (2006).…”

What societies want from a publishing partner

“…For example, Crow 13 suggests that almost 90% of societies publish just one title (whereas this was the case for only 45% of our respondents). Furthermore, ScholarlySocieties.org 8 indicates that 20% of societies are medical (66% of our respondents were from medical disciplines), 12% are in the social sciences (7% of our respondents were from social science societies), and 13% are in the life sciences (20% of our respondents were from life science societies).…”

Will the parasite kill the host? Are institutional repositories a fact of life - and does it matter?

“…It has been pointed out, by Raym Crow amongst others, 26,27 that by no means all publishers and all journals are commercial. As Figure 1 shows, 45% of journals are both owned and published by commercial publishers.…”