The Publishers Learning And Community Exchange (PLACE) at theplace.discourse.group is a new online public forum created for organisations who wish to adopt best practices in scholarly publishing. Publishers can access information from multiple agencies in one place, ask questions of the experts and join conversations with each other.
PLACE will be particularly useful for publishers whose resources are limited (in terms of time, human and financial resources) as well as those without access to publishing networks or with little publishing experience.
This new service has been developed by a partnership of four agencies committed to working more effectively together to support the needs of the scholarly publishing community worldwide:
- Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)
- Crossref
- DOAJ
- Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA)
All four organisations acknowledge that scholarly publishing can be challenging for new or under-resourced publishers. To achieve a diverse and equitable global publishing community it is critical to encourage the participation and impact of smaller, often scholar-led, publishers especially from low-income countries.
Publishers need to know where to find the right information, what policies they need to follow or international criteria they need to meet while minimising financial or technical barriers. We designed the PLACE as a ‘one-stop shop’ for publishers to ask these questions and find the support they need to adopt best practices.
In addition to working together to create PLACE, each organisation is taking action to lower barriers to participation and provide greater support for the publishers we work with.
A recently launched initiative from Crossref is the Global Equitable Membership program which helps to lower the financial and technical barriers to membership.
OASPA provides lower costs for small and newly established publishers to participate in Crossref services and has recently collaborated on a Diamond OA study to help build knowledge and capacity around diverse and sustainable pathways to Diamond Open Access.
COPE’s new strategic plan aims to increase membership from underrepresented areas such as South America, India, and China. This includes a reduced fees programme for eligible publishers/journals.
DOAJ is collaborating with ISSN and other organisations to offer diamond OA publishers low- or no-cost options for the long-term preservation of their published content (Project JASPER).
