Libraries take charge

Academic publishing is changing, and university libraries are becoming more intrinsically woven into the fabric of the new landscape. Although publishers affiliated with universities, such as Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press, have been around for centuries, university libraries are now launching their own publishing and content hosting initiatives, usually with a sole focus on Open Access. If you’re not familiar with it, Open Access is part of a movement to facilitate the free exchange of knowledge and widen access globally. It often entails publishing academic articles, books, resources and content under public copyright licences, usually Creative Commons licenses, to enable free distribution and reuse of the work under certain conditions.

The past decade has seen the launch of several new university presses in the UK dedicated to publishing Open Access research, including Cardiff University Press (launched in 2014), UCL Press (2015), the University of Westminster Press (2015), White Rose Press (2016) and, most recently, the Scottish Universities Press (2022). At the same time, libraries have been carving out their own space in the publishing sphere, providing hosting solutions to their academics, staff and students. Initiatives include the University of St Andrews Journal Hosting Service, Liverpool John Moores University Open Journals Service and Edinburgh Diamond (which I manage).

The diamond model

An interesting difference between the new Open Access publishers and the library services is that the latter tend to focus on the model known as “diamond Open Access”, which ensures that there are no submission fees, publication fees or access fees. The costs are often absorbed by the library. Libraries tend to define their services as those of “hosting services”, rather than of “publishers”, as the function is usually to support publishing outputs and ventures, not function as content editors.

Situated within Edinburgh University Library, Edinburgh Diamond is a free service that provides a publishing platform and support to academics, staff and students who wish to publish diamond Open Access books and journals. The service includes access to and training on a workflow management system (to help with the administration of submissions, peer review and publication); tech support; ISSN, ISBN and DOI registration; best practice guidance, including advice on publication ethics; indexing management; and annual reporting on article downloads, citation and reach. The service currently does not offer copyediting and typesetting services, and we expect editors to co-ordinate their own workflow and manage their own content. We currently have a portfolio of 19 journals, four conference proceedings and two books—with many more in the pipeline!

Edinburgh Diamond launched in 2009, then known as the Journal Hosting Service. It has grown organically, and since 2020 has rebranded as Edinburgh Diamond, now including books and conference proceedings. Our mission is to catch research coming from our institution that might otherwise fall through the cracks; perhaps the research is in a niche subject area, might be considered commercially unprofitable by certain publishers or is led by students (we currently have seven student-led journals). Libraries already do fantastic work in making research outputs available through institutional repositories (helping meet requirements for the Research Excellence Framework) and diamond Open Access hosting is a way for libraries to offer an alternative publishing model for those who seek it.

Challenges and growth

There are other reasons why library hosting services are increasing in popularity. A core change in the academic publishing sphere has been key funding bodies—such as UK Research and Innovation—enacting policy changes which, in a nutshell, require that the research they fund is made Open Access. Library hosting initiatives are usually compliant with these new policies, at no cost to the author or their institution. Furthermore, librarians are facing the high costs of monographs and textbooks, which we can expect to increase as publishers themselves face rising costs. This has a knock-on effect on students, who are more reliant on library services as the price of their key texts increase. In addition, publishers following more traditional models tend to use restrictive licensing terms, which means research cannot always be as widely disseminated and built upon as those under public copyright licenses. Finally, many librarians support the ethos of diamond Open Access publishing, believing that all research should be made freely available.

Library hosting is not without its challenges: ensuring sustainable growth and securing a reliable funding stream is vital to success, but budgets are tight. We also need to ensure that the role of the publisher isn’t lost: those sets of skills add immense value to research. Looking to the fut-ure, I expect we will see a continuation of growth in library hosting and library publishing (although not an exhaustive list, the Library Publishing Directory currently has 145 listed library publishers). Academic publishing needs shaking up, and perhaps libraries are the ones to do it.