Making Knowledge PublicThe Open Access Network is a non-profit organization leading a collective, inclusive, and global effort to develop a scalable and sustainable solution to scholarly communication in the humanities and social sciences.

http://knconsultants.org/toward-a-sustainable-approach-to-open-access-publishing-and-archiving/

Key Components

• Goal: fund entire scholarly communication infrastructure, not simply certain types of research output

• Funds collected, expended expressly for collaborative partnerships

• Focus on humanities and social sciences

• Institutions asked to fund (not necessarily libraries)

• Full participation from entire higher education community, from small community and liberal arts colleges and large research universities alike

Our Assumptions

• Researchers and scholars prefer to publish in venues most relevant to them and their peers, often those associated with scholarly societies

• Sharing and preserving products of research and scholarship are responsibility of every academic and research institution and library

• Current models of OA publishing based on cost-per-unit approaches are not easily adapted to new forms of scholarly communication, thus not scalable or sustainable

Our Proposal

We ask for annual institutional/library payment.

We encourage partnerships among libraries, scholarly societies, university presses, and others.

These mission-driven alliances develop infrastructure and best practices needed to support open, dynamic scholarly information ecosystem.

Value Proposition

• For institutions, libraries: advance research and scholarship, lower cost of education, support lifelong learning

• For scholarly societies, university presses: ensure revenue, sustain operations to maintain quality programs, support innovation

• For individuals, foundations, corporations: access research and scholarship to solve societal problems, fuel economy and innovation, support education

Sustainable Annual Payment

$0.50/student/year of study to highest degree awarded[AA = $1 | BA/BS = $2 | MA/MFA/MS = $3 | PhD/MD/JD = $5]

+$5/full-time faculty

(administration, staff, and adjuncts exempt)

OR

OA student fee + Matching institutional amount

MINUS

Support for institutional HSS OA initiatives

Distribution

Annual payment goes toward institutional priorities:

• Geographic/regional

• Subject discipline (e.g., linguistics)

• Language (e.g., French, Spanish, Chinese, Slavic)

• Format type (OERs, journals, monographs, platforms)

$5,200,000

Thank you!

Linguistics as Prototype

Key Points

• Our plan is incremental, employing traditional roles in evolving ways — we are not profit-driven so we can take long view.

• Our aim is to fund entire scholarly communication infrastructure — from creation to preservation — including all elements that make up scholarly record.

• Open Access Network is complementary, not competitive, with other OA models and projects.

Phased Approach

Launch phase: Demonstrate broad support for collective approach through membership program and test assumptions through conversations

Phase 1: Demonstrate proof of concept by converting some humanities and social science (HSS) publications to OA and by providing sustainable funding to some born-digital projects

Phase 2: Expand practical implementation of our model todemonstrate it can operate at scale

Phase 3 (full implementation phase): Expand funding and broaden application and review process for proposals to include all comers, from any discipline and from any publisher

Our Current Network

Knowledge Made Public

openaccessnetwork.org@OA_Networkoan@knconsultants.org