I won’t be talking too much about business models today, as I will be focusing mainly on publishing models. The reason for this is that many scholar-led publishers, which I will be focusing on here, don’t have formalised ‘business models’. Scholar-led publishers tend to explore a wide variety of different options to cover publishing costs, adapting to changing situations and new collaboration and funding opportunities, taking in everything from print sales to crowd-funding, from consortial funding models to donations, from volunteer and gift labour to institutional support and one-off grants. What I would like to put forward here though, is that when it comes to book publishing in specific, and open access book publishing more in particular, this isn’t a situation that is unique to scholar-led presses either. Many, if not most publishers of books in the HSS work with these kinds of mixed models to make ends meet, to publish the kinds of works that have always been hard to market let alone make profitable, due to their specialised focus, niche topic, experimental multimodal outlook, or their critical or radical character. For books in the humanities and social sciences sustainable business models are in many ways an oxymoron.

Therefore my focus here today is on publishing models, with which I mean the ways of organisation around scholarly publishing, which, as I will show, can also impact positively on business models, or on the costs involved in producing a scholarly publication. I will be focusing on collective, scholar-run, not-for-profit publishing models in specific today, based amongst

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others on research I conducted for Jisc on scholar-led presses, and based on my involvement with the Radical Open Access collective, which was formed a few years ago and recently launched a new website and information platform. Together with Sam Moore, I have been promoting and advocating on behalf of the Radical Open Access members in an effort at community building and support.

I would like to start off with going back to arguments I have made before about the idea of sustainability in relation to open access book publishing and APCs or BPCs more in specific, where the premise seems to be that in order to move beyond APCs we need to find a ‘sustainable and scaleable’ alternative, which is what we are exploring here today. Yet we need to keep in mind that the argument of ‘sustainability’ has been used previously to discredit open access: that it won’t work as it would never be sustainable and/or scaleable. But what does sustainability actually mean within different contexts. Does sustainability depend on a single model being sustainable or on making the entire model of scholarly publishing sustainable? Does it mean commercially viable, making a profit or breaking even? Does it mean sustainability in the short or long-run? And sustainable for who exactly? For scholars and their institutions, for governments and tax payers? For stakeholders in the commercial publishing model as it is currently set up? Does it mean self-sustainable or sustainable with a certain amount of funding? Sustainability for journals or for books too, and for both the sciences and the humanities? Sustainability in the sense of our relationship as publishers and scholars to technology, the environment and the wider ecology of which we are a part? It might be worth keeping these questions in mind when thinking about how the issue of sustainability has been put forward and framed within discussions on open access. For example, I would argue that the search among publishers, governments and other stakeholders within

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scholarly communication for the sustainable open access business model, has actually led to a situation where APCs have became the norm, and now similarly increasingly both publishers and funders are inclined to use BPCs for books, where a consensus seems to be forming that this is the most sustainable, quickest and least disruptive way to reach universal accessibility for monographs too. Yet many feel that this a form of sustainability that perhaps predominantly serves publishers and maintains the publishing system as it is currently set up.  Do we need to take into consideration, as David Ottina has argued, that from the point of view of incumbents, what needs sustaining are large margins? What about authors or other players within the system? As we are all aware here today, a reliance on BPCs or APCs risks disenfranchising independent, non-affiliated or so-called para-academics, early career researchers and PhD students and those on casualised contracts, scholars from the global south or in less wealthy institutions, or those who create the kind of research that critiques the institutions of which they are a part, expressing viewpoints that don’t meet with institutional approval. With BPCs a new set of gatekeepers, funders and institutions, will have to be navigated, and it is unclear how this dynamic will play out within the humanities especially. There are huge issues around governmentality here, and there is a risk that, similar to the subscription system, we will be creating a market for APCs and BPCs based on the brand of the publisher. BPCs based on the charges that are currently being set mainly by commercial publishers, will simply not be affordable, there is not enough money in the system.

This is why people such as David Ottina have argued that “sustainable publishing” invokes the wrong frame for understanding the stakes and dynamics of scholarly communications, which is actually much more of a

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volatile endeavor than a stable one. Especially with respect to the publishing of monographs in the humanities, one could argue that it has never been sustainable in the sense of self-sustaining, as it has always relied on some form of additional external funding. So perhaps this frame of sustainability is not that useful within this context. A frame of resilient communications might fit these dynamics better. The Open Access movement has already put forward many independent projects, which, if we take them all together, are developing, what Ottina calls a robust and resilient system of scholarly communications. It is exactly the diversity of these initiatives, and, being small and relatively flexible endeavors that are not risk adverse, which enables their capacity for change and experimentation. For Ottina, instead of focusing on economic sustainability, we should instead focus on a discussion of what kind of scholarly communications system we want and how we can make it resilient in the face of technological, institutional and funding volatility. Ottina provides the example of Open Humanities Press as an example of small scale resilience, but I think that on a larger scale, taken together, the moves towards creating loose alliances, collectives and co-operatives between academic-led and not for profit publishing entities similar stimulates the creation of these more resilient structures.

For those less familiar with scholar-led publishing, what are the characteristics of scholar-led publishing models? Last year Jisc released the report Changing publishing ecologies: A landscape study of new university presses and academic-led publishing authored by Graham Stone and myself. Next to a survey of new university presses in the UK, which Graham conducted, I contributed a landscape study of academic-led presses, based on interviews with 14 presses.

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The goal of this study was to map existing initiatives, many of which have been set up in the last 5 years, and to find out more about the challenges they face and their needs and requirements. But also to develop a strategy based on knowledge-sharing to make it easier for academics to set-up their own open access presses to further promote diversity in a publishing field currently predominantly occupied by large commercial publishers. Based on the research conducted for this report we formulated a few characteristics with respect to academic-led presses:

- First of all, although almost all presses came about due to the perseverance of strong leading figures most scholar-led presses are community based, connected to or established out of research groups, conferences, blogs, and journals, for example. Often they faced a lack of institutional support to set up a university press, or the contributors networks were distributed over too many institutions, however independence and autonomy were important aspects too, having not to deal with institutional risk-averseness and accommodating better what scholars want instead of what their institutions or funders want. Collaboration is seen as a main value here, both internally and externally, where the presses have also supported each other in various ways, from providing advice and support, to publishing or collaborating together.

- Most presses were also set up as a reaction to a situation and context in which open access to scholarly materials in the humanities remained and remains restricted. As academics, being personally affected by the lack of access to research materials was seen as an important motivator to set up their own presses. Open access was already

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becoming prevalent in journals in the sciences, but not yet in books. However, next to there being a lack of open access content in the humanities, there was also "little formal recognition" of already existing open access publishing here.

- Most scholar-led initiatives also share a dissatisfaction with the ongoing commercialisation of scholarship and expressed frustration with the prohibitively high profits made by commercial publishers. There exists a shared feeling that the book prices and BPCs of commercial publishers were prohibitively high, coupled to a desire within these academic-led models to create books that people can actually afford, both to publish and to read, making them also available to communities in developing countries, for example.

- Most academic-led presses are not-for-profit and set up or incorporated as charities or as having a charitable objective. There is an emphasis on the creation of a knowledge commons here and on using open licenses that allow both access and re-use next to a critical attitude towards the use of BPCs, although many presses do use BPCs. Part of this predominant not-for-profit stance also calls up issues around fair pay and the gifting of labour and volunteer work, which these initiatives heavily rely upon. Many academic-led presses are conscious of the issues around free labour and are experimenting with alternative forms of recognition for the agencies involved in knowledge production and on repackaging the large amounts of free and volunteer labour we already do for commercial publishers.

- Most academic-led presses are also characterized by the kind of content they publish. Several presses were specifically set up to promote (book) scholarship within a particular field. Academics also professed a need to promote more emerging or avant-garde academic content. Not enough presses allow scholars to produce research and publications that are multimodal or non-linear. This experimentation also extends to the publishing process itself, where various presses are experimenting with new business and publishing models, and with open review and processual research, for example.

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- Finally, academic-led presses can be seen as an extension of their scholar-directors own critical scholarly work. Various presses mentioned that their presses and processes where based on an ‘ethics of care’, acknowledging the various agencies involved in the publishing process, positioning an ethics of care against the logic of calculation that tends to dominate both academia and commercial publishing nowadays.

In what ways will these initiatives then be able to become resilient whilst, as I would call it, scale small. Due to their size and often not-for-profit background, scholar-led OA projects, do face various structural constraints, from lacking skill sets and experience to insufficient market leverage. What is important to note here is that these projects tend to work according to capacity, from a few books a year to several dozens, in order to keep it manageable to the people involved, which is also easier to achieve when there is not a profit motive. However, when taken together, in different constellations, these independent community-driven projects do have the potential to create a resilient ecosystem to support the scholarly commons. The diverse constellations of agencies that have emerged out of these OA publishing experiments, in the form of collectives, publishing co-operatives or purchasing consortia, have the potential to further transform academic publishing from not-for-profit to low-cost collectively underwritten models. Working from individual projects to contributing to collective and collaborative ones, will allow these projects to retain their independence and to honour their not-for-profit character, while providing a scaleable publishing model that aligns with the ethos of scholar-led publishing. Here, operating communally might aid in overcoming both structural and strategic disadvantages, while maintaining diversity and providing a framework capable of making publishing more resilient.

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One important way in which scholar-led presses have proven to be resilient is in bringing down costs. One of the main motivations of these endeavors has been to show that it was possible to publish cheaper (and faster) than traditional publishing outlets. Open Book Publishers provides a good example in this respect of how to bring cost down by at least a third compared to legacy publishers by using alternative distribution channels. Many scholar-led presses, working in a non-competitive fashion have also been very transparent about their finances, see some examples of writings on the costs of publishing and of running a press they have produced, to share knowledge on this front but also to show how cost-savings can be made on a small scale.

There is also a focus on, if they do use BPCs, to bring these down, to charge them according to what authors or their institutions can afford, to waive them completely where needed and to actively help authors find funding for their books. There is also an active focus on using, building and sharing open source tools and platforms to make publishing more efficient, to reduce reliance on commercial solutions and intermediaries and to create cost efficiencies in the system. Again here there are now efforts afoot, also recommended by the Jisc report, to start bringing these together in toolkits and information platforms to stimulate others to set up presses. And this effort towards resource and skills sharing characterizes the larger scholar-led publishing community as a whole, where there is a focus on knowledge sharing overall, on collaboration and mentoring of

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smaller and/or newer initiatives, of co-publishing, and of community and consortium forming on various levels. We see this emphasis on collaboration also in their experiments with publishing models: from the communal editing and publishing models favored by Open Humanities Press and Language Science press, to the focus on getting the community of readers more directly involved through crowd-sourcing and donations, as well as other collaborations and funding arrangements with public not-for-profit institutions such as libraries and universities, who have similar motivations towards the open dissemination of scholarly content.

As Sam Moore and I have outlined elsewhere, two models of collaboration in specific on the one hand characterize scholar-led presses, and on the other, when stimulated, could help them become more resilient. Firstly, a model that focuses on alliances of small independent projects within a certain sector (such as publishers) in collectives horizontally to create economies of scale, and secondly, one which encompasses collaboration across sectors or fields, vertically, to create multi-stakeholder ecologies.

Horizontal collaborations in collectives or consortia, facilitated through unions of small/independent presses, or of publishing communities taking on book series or journal projects, can provide mutual aid and logistical support, shared services and best practices. Open Library of Humanities (OLH), which brings various OA journals in the humanities together is a good example of this, as is the largest current collectives of presses, the Library Publishing Coalition, a US federation of research libraries involved in publishing support, founded in 2013 by over 60 academic and research libraries.

The Radical Open Access collective is a similar initiative in the form of a horizontal collaboration, a community of scholar-led, not-for-profit presses, journals and other open access projects. The collective promotes a progressive vision for open access based on mutual alliances between the 45+ member presses and projects seeking to offer an alternative to

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commercial and legacy models of publishing. Based on the contingent and diverse philosophy of radical open access and in line with the recommendations of the report to Jisc, the ROAC was set up as a further means of working towards a framework of resilience, of strength in diversity and in numbers.

The website and information platform acts as a showcase for these unique visions of open access, but also hopes to provide information for those interested in starting their own OA project. The site currently lists resources about the collective (including our philosophy), resources related to scholar-led publishing and a directory of scholar-led projects.

The information portal on the website provides a curated list of articles on topics related to scholar-led publishing, from publishing tools and funding opportunities for OA books, to marketing and editorial advice.

But what the Radical open access Collective also sets out to do is be a starting point for more vertical or multi-stakeholder collaborations that form another important strategy in making not-for-profit, independent publishing more resilient. Collaborations involving libraries, universities, funding agencies and infrastructure providers, all with a shared interest in the public value of knowledge. Here, there is scope for thinking of the various not-for-profit entities within scholarly communication as potential community partners in the emerging OA commons of academic publishing. The aim then becomes to realign the existing resources in the system of academic publishing, and to direct them to alternative not-for-profit collaborative models.

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What is needed to enable this is first and foremost a reimagining of what academic collectivity, community and commonality is and could be in a digital publishing environment, especially if these initiatives want to be able to provide a valid alternative to the commercial models and their market-driven focus. As Florian Schneider explains in this respect, new forms of collaboration need to be imagined. Reimagining the relations within the publishing system beyond a mere calculative logic focusing on assessing the sustainability of alternative models, is essential in a not-for-profit OA publishing environment, in order to enable new forms of collaboration and a redefining of (the future of) scholarly publishing in communal settings.

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