This issue focuses mostly on open access (OA). The issue is the result of a call for manuscripts and several recruited articles. The first four articles are about open access monographic publishing; the others, except the last, are on various open access topics.
We begin with “Towards an Author-Centered Open Access Monograph Program: Understanding Open Access Cultures in Scholarly Publishing.” This article, based on work at the University of Michigan Press, explores author attitudes toward open access in the humanities by using the OA culture framework. It offers a recent view of author sentiments on open access book publishing and demonstrates the importance of considering the needs of individual authors and disciplinary contexts.
Two articles look at important pieces of the infrastructure for open access monographs. “Open Access to Books—the Perspective of a Non-profit Infrastructure Provider” describes the past ten years of development, current technical approach, and prospects of the open access book platforms OAPEN Library and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB). The second article, “Sustainable Futures for OA Books: The Open Book Collective,” describes the Open Book Collective, a major output of the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project.
“What Is Your Threshold? The Economics of Open Access Scholarly Book Publishing, the ‘Business’ of Care, and the Case of punctum books” is a look at open access monographic publishing from the view of a small independent academic press. It tells the story of punctum books from its founding and provides perspectives on the current state of academic open access book publishing.
Another piece of open access infrastructure is described in “A User-Friendly Dashboard for Tracking Global Open Access Performance.” The Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI) Open Access Dashboard is an open-source, public dashboard for measuring and visualizing the open access performance of 189 countries and over seven thousand institutions.
“The Notion and Assessment of ‘Predatory’ in Scholarly Publishing” considers the current thinking on predatory open access journals and proposes an alternative to lists when evaluating open access journals.
In keeping with the current infatuation with artificial intelligence, in “Open Access: A Conversation with ChatGPT,” we tap the hive mind of the internet by interviewing ChatGPT to find out what it thinks about open access.
The final article in the issue is not about open access. “Giant in Isolation: Online Journal Publishing in Nigeria” makes the case that because Nigeria university-based journals have yet to embrace online publishing and are primarily print based, Nigeria scholarship does not achieve the international visibility it deserves.