Scaling Small
- ScholarLed is a consortium of scholar-led, not-for-profit, open access book publishers that was formed in 2018. Individually we comprise Mattering Press, meson press, Open Book Publishers, punctum books, African Minds, and mediastudies.press, and collectively we are seeking to develop powerful, practical ways for small-scale, scholar-led Open Access presses to grow and flourish in a publishing landscape that is changing rapidly. We want to make sure that change is for the better. + ScholarLed is a consortium of scholar-led, not-for-profit, open access book publishers that was formed in 2018. Individually we comprise Mattering Press, meson press, Open Book Publishers, punctum books, African Minds, mediastudies.press, and MayFly Books, and collectively we are seeking to develop powerful, practical ways for small-scale, scholar-led Open Access presses to grow and flourish in a publishing landscape that is changing rapidly. We want to make sure that change is for the better.
We asked ourselves: how can we ‘scale’ the work we do as presses, while preserving the advantages of being small, academic-led publishers with distinct identities and priorities? Instead of aiming to fit within the current infrastructures, processes, and priorities of a publishing system that tends to serve larger (often commercial) presses, we want to establish collaborative modes of working and to build infrastructures that will support the work of publishers like ours, in order to enable more such presses to grow and flourish. @@ -188,7 +188,7 @@
Scaling Small
We call this ‘scaling small’.- We have established a ScholarLed catalogue on OAPEN, which includes the hundreds of open access books published by our presses. We have developed a lightweight bookstand, which each publisher possesses, allowing us to showcase the output of the whole consortium at conferences and events. (The design and instructions to create your own version of the bookstand, as well as the source code of our website, are freely available for other presses to use here on our website.) We are also key partners in the international COPIM project, building community-owned, open systems and infrastructures to enable open access book publishing to flourish. Finally, we are exploring how ScholarLed can organise ourselves more formally as an entity, and how we might be able to support more academic-led presses in a direct way, perhaps by taking on new members (for more on this, see Parts One and Two of our roundtable blog post with our friends at OAPEN). + We have established a ScholarLed catalogue, which includes the hundreds of open access books published by our presses, and we host an every-other-month Salon, devoted to informal discussion and knowledge-sharing and open to anyone. We have developed a lightweight bookstand, which each publisher possesses, allowing us to showcase the output of the whole consortium at conferences and events. (The design and instructions to create your own version of the bookstand, as well as the source code of our website, are freely available for other presses to use here on our website.) We are also key partners in the international COPIM project, building community-owned, open systems and infrastructures to enable open access book publishing to flourish. We are organized as a Dutch non-profit foundation (constitution here), and welcome applications for membership.
We invite you to stay in touch with our work by reading our blog posts, following us on X, and checking out our member presses. ScholarLed also offers a package on the Open Book Collective, the sustainable funding platform for open access books. @@ -247,6 +247,9 @@
Members of ScholarLed
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