Crowdfunding in Open Access – De Gruyter cooperates with Unglue.it | Open Science

" ... A good example of application of this funding model to Open Access is the recently established cooperation between De Gruyter and Unglue.it. How does it work? The mechanism behind this partnership is simple. Users can contribute whatever amount they choose to a title. If a required amount of money is achieved, the book will be freed under Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC-ND. De Gruyter will be offering 100 titles from its e-dition series at the crowdfunding platform Unglue.it. Each title that raises 2,100 dollars at the site will be made available worldwide as open access content. The titles include books from 1958 to 2003, which currently can no longer be ordered. Most books are in German or in English. It is also worth mentioning that Unglue.it was set up to make ebooks free and universally accessible to libraries and individual readers alike. De Gruyter and Unglue.it have demonstrated that crowdfunding can be applied to Open Access. However, it is worth taking a look at this in the wider perspective ... Microryza is a crowdfunding platform for research. Individuals pool their money until the funding goal is reached. The users who make contributions will gain access to updates and progress from the lab and will have a chance to interact directly with researchers. At the end, they will receive the results of research. Right now, thanks to crowdfunding from Microryza, 12 research projects have been launched and many more are waiting for their sponsors ... Crowdfunding in Open Access may be considered in two ways. First of all, crowdfunding can be an additional business model for OA publishers. It is hard to believe that OA publisher could base its entire business on crowdfunding, but it may gain extra revenue and funds for publishing scientific articles and thus reduce the level of APCs for authors. Of course, an implementation of this kind of solution would not be easy.  Secondly, crowdfunding may be considered from the perspective of an individual researcher who plans to publish research in an Open Access model. In this case, a researcher may raise funds for this purpose by using crowdfunding mechanisms dedicated to that type of need.  This way, a researcher may be able to gain money without the help of a university or any other institution. It may be very helpful, especially when grants for publishing in OA are limited or negligible, as in the case of HSS ..."