Educopia Institute and California Digital Library are pleased to announce an award in the amount of $2,200,000 from Arcadia—a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin—in support of the “Next Generation Library Publishing” project.

Through this project, Educopia and its partner institutions—California Digital Library (CDL), Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), Longleaf Services, LYRASIS, and Strategies for Open Science (Stratos)—will provide new publishing pathways for authors, editors, and readers by advancing and integrating open source publishing infrastructure to provide robust support for library publishing.

“The costs of creating and accessing scholarship have soared in recent years. Library publishers seek to advance scholarly communications by providing highly competitive, reasonably priced, and community-driven scholarly publishing services to editors, scholars, students, and researchers,” said Katherine Skinner, Executive Director of Educopia. “This project will significantly increase and improve the tools, business models, and workflows available to library publishers, boosting their ability to scale up their work and meet the growing needs of the field.”

Beginning in September 2019, the “Next Generation Library Publishing” project team will work to achieve these goals by accomplishing the following:

Creating a more balanced, effective academic publishing ecosystem that aligns with academic values and increases choice, opportunity, and innovation via compelling library publishing solutions Developing tools and standards that allow better integration of campus repository systems and publishing workflows across the lifecycle of scholarly research Establishing sustainable, community-governed, open solutions that rival current best-of-breed commercial tools and advance scholarly communication in important ways.

“Community-owned and governed open infrastructure will ensure that institutions control their own data as well as their technology,” said Kristen Ratan, Founder of Stratos. “By working with existing and emerging open source projects, we can assemble and connect secure and flexible research communication solutions for institutions.”

Catherine Mitchell, Director of Publishing & Special Collections at the California Digital Library added, “Library publishers play an increasingly integral role in the publication and distribution of scholarly research. We should insist that the publishing tools and services we use are sustainable, address the varied needs of our academic communities, and reflect our values as institutions committed to the open exchange of knowledge worldwide.”

Educopia and its partner institutions are deeply appreciative of Arcadia’s generous support of this work. For more information, contact Katherine Skinner, Executive Director, Educopia Institute, at katherine@educopia.org.

About Educopia

Educopia Institute empowers collaborative communities to create, share, and preserve knowledge. Educopia also develops and manages applied research projects that benefit our affiliated communities and the broader information fields of libraries, archives, and museums. Learn more at https://educopia.org and follow us on Twitter.

About CDL

California Digital Library provides transformative digital library services, grounded in campus partnerships and extended through external collaborations, that amplify the impact of the libraries, scholarship, and resources of the University of California.

About Arcadia

Arcadia is a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. It supports charities and scholarly institutions to preserve cultural heritage and the environment. Arcadia also supports projects that promote open access and all of its awards are granted on the condition that any materials produced are made available for free online. Since 2002, Arcadia has awarded more than $663 million in grants to projects around the world.

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