Preprint communities came together to advance the long-term sustainability of their services through a collective fundraising campaign in 2023. The impetus for the campaign is described in this previous blog post on Cost-Effective Open Scholarship, where the call to action was made to advance support for open-access publishing via support for preprint communities and shared infrastructure.
A Campaign for Preprint Support
The campaign was highly successful in reaching its targeted funding total to cover the costs of seven preprint communities operating on OSF Preprint infrastructure. This funding has directly contributed to the expansion of these communities, allowing them to reach a wider audience and advance open scholarship. The campaign received support from academic institutions in the US, Belgium, and the Netherlands, demonstrating the global recognition of the importance of preprint communities in the scholarly ecosystem.
Preprint publishing offers scholars a free mechanism for sharing their scholarship publicly with no barriers to access. Communities can develop standards for sharing scholarship in their domain, cultivate norms, and align incentives for open practices. Using a shared open-source infrastructure like OSF Preprints creates a cost-effective model with economies of scale and avoids vendor lock-in.
Global Supporters for Preprints
Many of the Ivy Plus Library Confederation's members’ commitment to providing three years of support for OSF Preprint infrastructure and community servers signals policy decisions taking action.
“I think given the current challenges facing scholarly communications, it is important that academic libraries broaden our scope of interests and financially support the appropriate communication of scholarship throughout its lifecycle,” said Laura Hanscom, Head of Scholarly Communications and Collections Strategy at MIT Libraries. “Supporting the preprint collections of the global scholarly communities using the OSF infrastructure is an important example of this, and I am thrilled that so many IPLC organizations are supporting this effort!”
The campaign garnered support from institutions that are making the commitment to open access with dedicated budgets, such as VU Amsterdam’s Open Access Innovation Fund.
“Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam strongly believes that knowledge and science should be open to anyone,” said Anne van den Maagdenberg, Open Access Librarian at VU Amsterdam. “Preprint communities like the COS coalition allow authors to share their work immediately (and without cost), hereby accelerating open and transparent research. We are happy our VU Open Access Innovation fund enables us to invest in these communities that share our vision for equitable and open publishing.”
Support for public access to all research is paramount to advancing knowledge. The long-term sustainability of scholarly communities and infrastructure to continue to advance open-access publishing models needs continued financial and action-oriented support. Join in support for preprint communities and infrastructure to advance cost-effective open scholarship.
I’m interested in exploring this opportunity for my institution.
Contact Nici Pfeiffer (nici@cos.io) for more details on your institution’s role in supporting open-access infrastructure and communities of practice.
