Yes, Scholar-Publishers Can Make Common Cause After All | Allegra Lab

by Anne Brackenbury Last spring, I began work with the open access advocacy group, Libraria, as a Community Convener to help organize a mutual aid network amongst a group of open access publications in anthropology and adjacent fields. Cooperate for Open (or C4O, as this network is affectionately known), is motivated by the idea that there is a wide variety of open access models suitable for different contexts and scales. In the case of C4O the focus is on small, scholar-led, open access publications that consistently find themselves — sometimes deliberately — on the margins of scholarly publishing. I wrote a piece for Allegra Lab about the rationale behind the project when I began this contract, wondering whether (and hoping that) scholar-publishers could make common cause. Now, as my work winds down, it seems as good a time as any to offer my answer to that question. [...]