March 31, 2025
Thousands of smaller publishers in Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom play a key role in scholarly communication. These publishers offer vital channels of communication for all subject areas but are particularly important for scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. Additionally, they provide academics who have a particular regional, cultural, linguistic, or thematic interest or need with opportunities to publish and build communities. They publish in European languages, not only in English.
The Knowledge Exchange has commissioned a study from Information Power to identify and analyse the challenges — both real and perceived — small publishers face when transitioning to open access publishing and to explore the pathways that these publishers consider and adopt in making the transition. Key pathways available include:
· Collaborations and cooperations with diverse partners
· Partnerships with larger, more commercial publishers
· Adopting diamond open access models that leverage public or institutional technical support and subsidies
· Other innovative approaches tailored to their unique needs
The study will assess stakeholders’ perceptions of the benefits, costs, and sustainability of each pathway and develop recommendations to improve each pathway and better support smaller publishers in their open access journey.
If you would like to get involved in the project, please email thom.barneswise@informationpower.co.uk and let us know if you are a small publisher or an organisation that wants to support small publishers be successful as they transition to OA.
About the Knowledge Exchange – Partners in the Knowledge Exchange are six key national organisations within Europe tasked with developing infrastructure and services to enable the use of digital technologies to improve higher education and research: CSC in Finland, CNRS in France, DeiC in Denmark, DFG in Germany, Jisc in the UK, and SURF in the Netherlands. They share a clear vision that scholarship should be open and are working together to support the development of digital infrastructure to enable open scholarship. Their collective voice informs national and international policies and promotes common approaches, so that it becomes easier for scholarship to cross national boundaries.
About Information Power – Information Power is a consulting company skilled in driving change through successful cross-stakeholder collaboration. This focus is coupled with decades of combined management experience, unique spheres of international influence, expertise in qualitative and quantitative research, and a very successful track record. For more than 15 years we have helped funders, libraries and library consortia, and publishers benefit from new opportunities.
