The video of our discussion with Reggie Ragu and Jill Claasson about the new continental platform for #OA publishing in Africa is now available! https://youtu.be/5QIIsFt6ax8

Hi Tom.

In fact, something “rudimentarily similar” already exists in several places (e.g. besides Editoria, also in Heidelberg with heiMPT or of course Calibre or similar), but mostly rather specifically embedded in local or proprietary workflows or limited to them.

The OS-APS, on the other hand, is intended to be flexibly usable and integrable…[Read more]

Hi Markus,

Sounds like you’re going to be working on some really interesting stuff here. Good luck! In what way do you see this as producing something different to existing tools that already seem to do a lot of these things (I’m thinking, platforms like Coko and Editoria)? A diverse choice of open source tools is useful but sometimes I’m a bit…[Read more]

Dear Lucy,

the funding guideline was aimed at open access publishers or corresponding publishing activities. Accordingly, this is a bit of a thread running through all the projects:

Sustainability and financing parameters of business and transformation models (CODRIA, TOAA, TransMILL, TU9_Monos, Wallstein-OA, ScholarLedPlus, KOALA, OAdine),…[Read more]

More boOmArks! On Tuesday (2nd March) we will be speaking to Reggie Raju and Jill Claasson about the new continental OA platform for books and journals that has been launched in Africa. It should be a really interesting conversation, and as always is free and open to all — hope to see you there!

Zoom link available with the blog post here:…[Read more]

Hi Markus, this is really interesting, thanks for sharing. I was wondering, are all the 20 projects linked in some way, or are you all independent of each other?

One more: https://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2021/02/open-access-for-backlist-books-part-ii.html

Sorry about all the baseball references.

The Federal Ministry of Research and Education has funded various Open Access projects in Germany (see here). In the following, I briefly present ours, the development of an open source infrastructure called “Open Source Academic Publishing Suite (OS-APS)” for media-neutral (Open Access) publishing: https://os-aps.de/en/.

The background of the…[Read more]

Cambridge University Library is looking for a Scholarly Communications Specialist. The role involves developing support for open access monograph publishing. Deadline 15 March: https://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/28708/

The University of London Press (an OA press) is looking for a Publications Officer in a part-time capacity. “An exciting opportunity has arisen for a Publications Officer to join the newly launched University of London Press based in the School of Advanced Study at a pivotal moment in its history. The Press is being focused towards a new…[Read more]

Hi, great to see this article which ‘opens up’ the conversation and explores additional steps that could be taken – including books and chapters.

To add to Agata’s comments:

If there is indeed some level of agreement on the limitations and extent to which the Gold OA model, through a ‘Book-Processing-Charge (BPC)’ model, can work on a…[Read more]

Comments on proposed framewrok:

I think it would be worth thinking a bit more about what kind of OA you want to push for and integrate it with the proposed framework.
You already have a point about supporting business models other than these based on APCs, but there is no such consideration in the framework itself for books.
Also, in the…[Read more]