Imagine a publishing house with the mission of making knowledge and insights available to everybody for free, while ensuring high standards.
Well, the three universities of Berlin and the Charité have now joined forces to do just that.
They founded "Berlin Universities Publishing". Neither authors not readers pay. The pdf of books are freely available under a Creative Commons licence.
It's called "Diamond Open Access". They're just starting up. Much more to come.
What a wonderful initiative.
I grew up in Berlin and took my undergraduate degree at the FU, in the 1980s. Berlin was the place to which free-thinking students from all over West Germany came, I was one of the few Berlin "natives". (I've been in England since.)
Officially my studies were in the technical subject that I currently teach, but in reality I pursued my own self-designed studies across all disciplines: philosophy, politics, mathematics. That was possible then, those days are long gone of course. These were the years that formed me, I am forever grateful.
I still have a soft spot for the FU and I can see myself publishing a monograph at BUP. A very impressive initiative. My congrats to you on being part of the inaugural catalogue!
I guess they already have a web server. Putting some more PDFs on it cost what?
If you are interested in a university-owned free (at the point of provision) service of this kind (different in scope than an actual university publisher, but similar technology) that happily shows all the work that goes into it, not just marginal cost, consider following @tore
@sinensetin Wouldn't wonder if, even hope that, Berlin Universities Publishing are in contact with @tore.
@wonka @tore @TimWardCam @W_Lucht
We're part of the same larger professional community. We talk, no worries.
@TimWardCam I work at a library that's hosted a couple of Diamond Open Access journals for some years. At mine, the library pays to host the infrastructure (based on open source software) - cheaper by far than paying to publish a single article in Nature - and provide technical support to editors (a small fraction of a staff role, no big deal).
Editors deal with the other stuff -- [1/2]
@TimWardCam
--I think mostly by seeking volunteers from fellow academics (which is largely how the Big Publisher journals run too, really) but possibly some departmental funding for a casual to copyedit.
I think some Diamond OA journals get grants, or rely even more heavily on volunteers who want to add it to their CV or believe in the mission, or other models.
But ultimately costs are pretty low because we're not trying to pay for massive marketing budgets or dividends for our stakeholders.
A dedicated publication server is a wee bit more than just a website. Both in terms of technology and in terms of service...
However, if anything squeezes our ability to afford anything, it is profit margins of 30%+ of major academic publishing houses, who appropriate academics' labor, sell that labor back to academia with little added value and, on top, track researchers' behavior online.
Have a look at Elsevier/RELX, for example.
@TimWardCam @sinensetin @wonka @W_Lucht "Do tell which "major academic publishing house" makes 30%+."
They pretty much all do. See https://svpow.com/2012/01/13/the-obscene-profits-of-commercial-scholarly-publishers/ That post is 13 years old but the picture has not changed.)
@TimWardCam @sinensetin @wonka @W_Lucht No, not university presses. Just "major academic publishing houses", which was what you asked about.
It would be interesting to know similar figures for university presses. I think quite a few of them are now owned by the big corps anyway.
@TimWardCam @sinensetin @wonka @W_Lucht Potentially. But moving journals is not always straightforward, as publishers will often claim, with varying degrees of legitimacy, to own the journal.
That's why there are so many instances of editorial boards quitting en masse, leaving behind a zombie journal, and starting a new one as its successor. Glossa is one well-known example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossa_(journal)
@W_Lucht Aalborg University 🇩🇰 also has open access publishing. We publish books, textbooks, reports and open journal proceedings.
AAU OPEN’s Competence Unit guides AAU's researchers within Open Access, Open Science, and open publishing opportunities. At the same time, AAU Open Publishing is an alternative publishing platform for open publications from Aalborg University, i.e. PhD theses, books, journals, and reports.
@W_Lucht Just to clarify: 'Diamond Open Access' is a publishing category that has been around for quite a while, up until now mainly for journals. It's very nice to see that an academic publisher extends this publication model to books as well.
BTW: The DOAJ currently lists more than 13,000 journals worldwide for which content is available without costs:
https://doaj.org/search/journals?source=%7B%22query%22%3A%7B%22bool%22%3A%7B%22must%22%3A%5B%7B%22term%22%3A%7B%22bibjson.apc.has_apc%22%3Afalse%7D%7D%2C%7B%22term%22%3A%7B%22bibjson.other_charges.has_other_charges%22%3Afalse%7D%7D%5D%7D%7D%2C%22size%22%3A50%2C%22sort%22%3A%5B%7B%22created_date%22%3A%7B%22order%22%3A%22desc%22%7D%7D%5D%2C%22track_total_hits%22%3Atrue%7D
@jer_gib
To clarify on this: They only support authors from participating institutions in Berlin without taking fees during the publication process. Access to their publications is free worldwide:
"Publications from BerlinUP Books are publicly accessible worldwide in open access – without legal, technical or financial barriers and without embargoes, which restrict reuse by third parties."
@mschomm @jer_gib
This has just been launched. You have to start somewhere, incl. with the funding & staff. I think it shows a direction and could grow if there's sufficient commitment, and engagement, and funding for a "public service".
They wrote an article (in German, with English summary) on "The Price of Diamond Open Access": "In order to counter the financial and infrastructural dependencies of academia on large commercial publishers ... towards the common good."
@W_Lucht @mschomm All true, and I wish you well. Hopefully it will become so successful that it can in due course be available to non-Berlin authors too!
Incidentally, there is a German source of funding to underwrite Diamond OA publication initiatives. The name currently eludes me, but I think LMCS have benefitted from it. Have you/they tried to access this?
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