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title: "Small publishers and subscribe to open"
layout: post
image: 
    feature: oa.png
---
There's a lot of focus in the scholarly communications space on transformative agreements for the mega-publishers. Indeed, most of the discourse, most of the time, is about the big publishers in this space. They play Big Bad Wolf with their exorbitant profit margins and make for an easy target. Heck, that's where I came to OA: through frustration at a lack of access to life-saving or life-enriching scholarly work, when some publishers were making absolute mega-bucks profit.

But, over time, I've changed my focus in how I talk about different types of academic publisher, based on whether they share a "mission" or "values" -alignment with my vision for higher education. This doesn't even have to mean that an academic publisher is "not for profit". This can sometimes be a hindrance for particular types of revenue-collecting activity. Certainly, I know from personal experience just how difficult it can be to manage the overhead of a UK charity. Other organizations, like Hypothes.is, have recently [changed their corporate form](https://web.hypothes.is/blog/say-hello-to-anno/). I've written, previously, about how it can be worth "binding yourself to the mast" by incorporating in a form that doesn't allow for buy-out, but legal corporate form is not the be-all and end-all (as Sam Moore has also covered before).

So it was of interest to me when a small academic publisher, The White Horse Press, approached me with a question about what it could do to move to open access; particularly for its journal _Nomadic Peoples_. Obviously, this title has special relevance to communities who are not normally involved in academic cultures and would not normally have subscription access. OA here is important. The press, furthermore, recognised this and wanted to do the "right thing". I spoke with them. They are a small organization of just a few people. Their publishing activity is not going to get them mega-rich. But they do need to pay their staff's salaries -- which seems fair enough. (Again, I am reminded of Sam Moore's recent articulations that we should not seek a total austerity in academic publishing -- it is against labour to demand the constant depression of living standards for professionals working in this space. That is different to surplus value extraction at mega levels, as above.)

An APC model would not work here, and so I suggested that they implement their own Subscribe to Open-type model for the journal. The idea behind this is that if the current subscriber base simply re-subscribes for the next year, they'll make the title OA for that year. They'd have the same revenue. So why not go OA?

Will it work? I don't know. But it's a fairly low-risk way of trying it. If they don't meet their target, then they're just doing what they did every other year and stay subscription. If they do make the target, though, the payoff is potentially great. [I hope that they do](https://www.whpress.co.uk/publications/journal-prices/).

There's also a level of communication here that seems difficult to gauge. _Should_ subscribers be told that the work will be OA, or does that not matter given that, if they don't subscribe, it won't be? I tend to think that transparency is important here so people aren't caught by surprise. But explaining OA from scratch to an audience that isn't totally interested can be... uphill, shall we say.

Certainly, at this point, we need smaller publishers to see that this model -- and others like it -- can work for them. If we don't provide positive case studies and give these smaller entities, who want to do the right thing, evidence that OA isn't just a bankrupting model, then we're in trouble. Why? Because if you eradicate these smaller organizations you'll be left only with the familiar, more sizeable, players... And that doesn't make for a healthy ecosystem. Hence, showing that S2O and other non-APC models can work for publishers of all sizes is incredibly useful right now.

(Of course, I know that some more radical voices would like to burn down the entire system and start again with pure-diamond, centralized not-for-profits at the core. I have here assumed that while that system sounds great, the practicalities of implementing it are beyond our coordination abilities.)