Stockholm University Press is an intrinsic part of the research infrastructure at Stockholm University, just like our home, the University Library. The approach is to provide relevant publishing services for peer-reviewed and open publications with a non-profit model. We want to encourage researchers to publish open books and journals while we help them stick to best practices and uphold academic rigour.
EU calls for publicly owned ecosystem for academic publishing
The EU Council published their conclusions on high-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy and equitable scholarly publishing in May this year to ensure that stakeholders in academic publishing are heading in a desirable direction. Many involved parties responded to the conclusions with their take on the goals for open science. A joint response from several organisations that Stockholm University Press is involved in, such as LIBER and OPERAS, noted that the EU Council Conclusions “indicate a strong consensus among EU Member States towards promoting scholarly publishing”. Such consensus, we believe, should hopefully lead to further developments ensuring that open science is not just something for a privileged few.
The conclusions encourage member states to invest in developing an ecosystem for scholarly publishing that is not-for-profit and publicly owned. To truly create an equitable system, it should be a system which doesn’t charge fees to readers or authors. The joint response points to initiatives already launched, such as the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access and Journal Comparison Service. However, the proposed shift to equitable open access seems to require a restructuring in publishing and research assessment funding to lead the way forward.
Supporting open books
While this development is something that Stockholm University Press fully support, we do have a financial model for open books based on per-published-item fees to ensure that we are not constricted by funding to disseminate essential works but also remain eligible for researchers outside of our institution to peruse the services while still justifying the costs to the University. The term equitable does not necessarily imply that the prerequisites should look the same for all involved parties. Nevertheless, based on the consensus presented, we are challenged to develop further financial models to produce books in the coming years.
One initiative we are currently looking into is the Open Book Collective, which brings together institutions and open access publishers to secure “diversity and financial futures of open access book production and dissemination”. The practical meaning is that they are trying to provide an infrastructure for a diamond model for open access books, which looks promising. We hope that a model that distributes costs among interested institutions will allow us to lower our processing fees considerably or even provide possibilities for a diamond open access model for books.
Supporting open journals
For the journals market, where the titles from Stockholm University Press either depend on grants from research funding organisations, such as the Swedish Research Council or use article processing fees where no funding is available, we also need to look at the market for academic journals today.
The BIBSAM consortium in Sweden has been negotiating transformative agreements with publishers for some years now, and this has been a successful approach as most of (70% according to the latest report from the National Library of Sweden) the scientific articles from Swedish researchers are now available with immediate open access. However, as the terms of several agreements are about to run out, negotiations are also in progress to ensure future access. The critical task now is to ensure that an actual transformation towards immediate open access occurs. The Association of Swedish Higher Education Institutions published a report (available in English at the bottom of the linked web page) this month, recommending not to sign any more read-and-publish agreements after 2026. An interview by the Stockholm University Library Director, Wilhelm Widmark, explains how this proposed approach can be interpreted. The goal is now to reduce the significant costs associated with the agreements, as noted in a recent news article from Stockholm University.
It may be an unintended consequence of the increased spending on open access publishing via transformative agreements. Still, journals from smaller players or niche research areas need help finding models to pay their expenses. These journals are often not commercially viable for the big publishers, and it is difficult for authors to cover the fees themselves. The journals published by Stockholm University Press belong to this category. We can help them along by providing usage statistics and budget calculations. Still, they have to find the funding to pay for the publishing costs as there is no general support from the University. This model makes sense to a certain degree as a journal should be editorially independent to publish sound research from anyone anywhere. However, it makes it harder for Editors to run their editorial offices when they sometimes struggle to find authors prepared to engage in the administrative tasks needed to pay per-article fees outside of the transformative agreements.
From this point of view, we welcome initiatives to secure institutional funding with some kind of distributed model. While cross-stakeholder initiatives like, for example, the DIAMAS Project are welcome, some smaller journals may have to fold before a somewhat equitable solution is in place.
Forwarding the irrevocable shift
The consensus among European states and the ongoing projects and initiatives encouraging both bigger and smaller actors is thus a great help to scholar-led publishing organisations, such as Stockholm University Press. We are delighted to see many ongoing conversations highlighted in this year’s Open Access Week with the theme “Community over Commercialization”. Nevertheless, we have a long way to go before providing a more equitable publishing landscape across disciplines and geographic areas. We do have an infrastructure in place, but we also need researchers to be able to use it.
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