Improving Community Funding and Workflows for Scholar-led Journals and Blogs

Open access journals and blogs run by academics and therefore independent of big and commercial publishers (scholar-led) embody the idea of a biblio-diverse publishing ecosystem. They often catalyze creative and experimental formats, models and strategies that benefit the publishing community as a whole. Yet they are constantly underfunded, and often enough they have to cease operations due to financial incapacities and the lack of a sustainable business model. And while many initiatives support open access publications already, genuine open access journals and blogs without author-facing fees (diamond open access) are plunged into a substantial affordability crisis. The research project “Scholar-led Plus'' recognizes their precarious situation and develops over the course of 24 months a support structure that is funded and owned by the academic publishing community.

The poster illustrates three core elements of the research project that are designed to lead to the creation of the support structure in December 2022. This support structure will foster better practice in funding open access journals and blogs and guide them towards more efficient and outcome oriented workflows.

1. Developing a concept for the support structure: How do we build a supportive model that takes demands, needs and requirements of both journals and funders into account? This process is multi-leveled, involves a wide set of stakeholders (journals, blogs, libraries, research societies, funders, …) and therefore raises a multitude of challenges. These challenges are to be addressed through an accompanying research, which enables a robust framework for easy reuse in different funding setups.
2. Involving the community in building the support structure: the poster will present and contextualize first results from a survey regarding costs and expenditures of OA journals, which lays the foundation for our resilient funding model and kicks-off our event series of community outreach. Following up on this, we will host several workshops in Spring 2022 in order to identify a set of user stories and use-cases of such a support structure. Our target audiences are journals, funders and everyone else with an interest in creating a sustainable and community-rooted support structure.
3. Streamlining funding processes and workflows for community publishing: The poster will outline three key areas of support for scholar-led publishing and follow-up on recent literature on community-based, horizontal, participatory and democratic governance. Since scholar-led publishing often has to manage with a minimum of administrative capacity, we intend to provide funding and consulting while minimising overhead for journals and RFOs.

As a means of activating the community, the poster is a call for participation at the same time: We ask journals, blogs and funders to take part in the workshop series, focus groups and expert interviews and will provide a timeline including action points and multiple opportunities to get involved.