By Christina Lenz, Managing Editor for books at Stockholm University Press
How do we as a university press contribute to equitable foundations for open knowledge?
This year’s theme on Open Access Week is “Designing Equitable Foundations for Open Knowledge”.
As part of Stockholm University Library, we have the mission to help students and researchers around the world to access the information they need without barriers. It is a fact that not many people know that Stockholm University Press welcomes researchers all around the world to publish with us, but in order to achieve equity, diversity and inclusion we let researchers from all universities around the world have the possibility to publish with us.
There are no shortcuts for Swedish researchers, well-known authors or researchers from prestigious universities, and we guarantee that all articles and books undergo rigorous peer review, in what we hope to be transparent and as equitable as it could be in this process.
A small open access University Press
Stockholm University Press is a small University Press. We published our first journal in late 2014 and our first book in 2015. Today we have eight journals and ten book series in different disciplines. Open access publishing at Sweden’s largest University is not a small thing, but it is sometimes a difficult thing. As much as we aim to be inclusive and promote diversity, it’s difficult when all disciplines yet haven’t made the transition to open access. This is particularly difficult for open monographs.
Importance of the support from the President of the University
To take action in making openness the default for researchers, we have found it essential to have the support from the President of Stockholm University, Astrid Söderbergh Widding. Her efforts of promoting fully open access publishing and an open data policy, and supporting to not accept package deals from major academic scholarly commercial publishers, has turned out to be a big promoter for open access publishing in general at Stockholm University.
We do hope that we as part of Stockholm University aim to promote open access publishing and open science in many different aspects, and thereby design equitable foundations for open knowledge.
Stockholm University Press Blog 