Accelerating academy-owned publishing – IO: In The Open

"How can libraries develop more robust mechanisms for supporting services and platforms that accelerate research sharing and increase participation in scholarship? What kind of funding and partnerships do scholarly communities, public goods technology platforms, and open repositories need to transform into true, academy-owned open access publication systems? In an initiative formerly known as “Red OA,” these are the questions a group of ARL deans and directors have recently committed to address through engagement with scholarly communities and open source platform developers. The current system of scholarly journal publishing is too expensive, too slow, too restrictive, and dominated by entities using lock-in business practices. Fortunately, there are a growing number of scholarly communities embracing services and platforms that accelerate research sharing and increase participation in scholarship. Some of these communities are keenly interested in integrating journal publishing and peer review services into repository platforms, and bringing greater transparency and efficiency to the peer review process itself. At the same time, there is a global movement to build value-added services on top of distributed, library-based repositories, in order to “establish [open] repositories as a central place for the daily research and dissemination activities of researchers,” rather than the commercial sphere."