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, 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.

We call this ‘scaling small’.

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.

CONTACT US OUR BOOKS SUPPORT US

ABOUT US

Members of ScholarLed

The aim of the collective is to explore the potential of working together. This includes developing systems and practices that allow presses to provide each other with forms of mutual support, ranging from pooled expertise to shared on- and offline infrastructures. Members of the consortium each retain their distinct identity as publishers, with different audiences, processes, business models and stances towards Open Access. What they share, however, is a commitment to opening up scholarly research to diverse readerships, to resisting the marketization of academic knowledge production, and to working collaboratively rather than in competition.

Open Book Publishers

Mattering Press

Media Studies Press

Meson Press

Punctum Books

African Minds

MayFly

OPEN INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT

Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

We are key partners in the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project, a major international partnership of researchers, universities, librarians, open access book publishers and infrastructure providers that is building community-owned, open systems and infrastructures to enable open access book publishing to flourish.

COPIM began as a three-year project, in November 2019, and funded by a £2.2 million grant from Research England and an £800,000 grant from Arcadia Fund. COPIM's work was extended by the Open Book Futures project (2023–2026), with additional grants from Arcadia and Research England.

Among the COPIM initiatives are the Open Book Collective (with a ScholarLed package), the Thoth metadata platform, the Experimental Publishing Compendium, and the Opening the Future funding model.

You can stay in touch with developments in COPIM’s work via its website, its comprehensive open documentation site and via X.

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Read more about our plans

Members of ScholarLed have written on our blog and elsewhere about the ethos that underlies the consortium and other groups that share our aims and with whom we work.

Eelco Ferwerda and ScholarLed, ‘"Scaling small: the story behind ScholarLed" – Part 1’, 10 June 2020, https://www.oapen.org/blog/?link=https%3A%2F%2Foapen.hypotheses.org%2F93
Eelco Ferwerda and ScholarLed, ‘"Scaling small: the story behind ScholarLed" – Part 2’, 10 June 2020, https://oapen.org/blog/?link=https%3A%2F%2Foapen.hypotheses.org%2F99
Lucy Barnes (University of Cambridge/Open Book Publishers), ‘ScholarLed collaboration: a powerful engine to grow open access publishing’, 26 October 2018, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2018/10/26/scholarled-collaboration-a-powerful-engine-to-grow-open-access-publishing
Mafalda Marques (JISC Collections), ‘OA monographs discovery in the library supply chain: draft report and recommendations’, 25 October 2018, https://scholarlycommunications.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2018/10/25/oa-monographs-discovery-in-the-library-supply-chain-draft-report-and-recommendations
Janneke Adema (Coventry University/Open Humanities Press), ‘One Year Later’, 22 October 2018, http://radicaloa.disruptivemedia.org.uk/one-year-later

Resources

ScholarLed members have been developing various resources, tools, and software to support scholar-led publishing. In the spirit of community building we are sharing these here and on Github. Please get in touch if you have any questions about these resources.