Toward a scalable and sustainable approach to open access publishing and archiving for humanities and social sciences societies: A proposal

Abstract

The proposal we offer here (and in the more extensive ‘white paper’ proposal on which this article is based) tackles head-on the open access (OA) business models that have proven particularly problematic for implementation of OA in the humanities and social sciences (HSS). Our proposal suggests all tertiary institutions contribute to systemic support of the research process itself, including its entire scholarly output. A bold rethinking of the economics of OA by way of partnerships among scholarly societies and academic libraries funded by an institutional fee structure based on a student-and-faculty per-capita sliding scale, our plan is nevertheless intentionally incremental. Our proposal focuses first on HSS and primarily in the United States, but just as research and scholarship are increasingly global and collaborative, our plan is not bound by discipline or national borders, but can be adopted by all those looking for a more equitable and sustainable OA model.