by Vivian Berghahn, Managing Director and Journals Editorial Director

In 2021 Berghahn Open Anthro entered its second year as a ground-breaking three-year pilot. In this two-part blog post we will share how its journey has brought together various stakeholders to realize the goal of attaining an equitable path to open access using the subscribe-to-open (S2O) model. 

Our intention is to outline how stakeholders have supported the pilot: as a researcher by urging their library to maintain subscriptions for the journals they value as a reader and author; as a librarian by advocating that budgets remain allocated to those journal(s) in order to support their faculty needs; as a funder by endorsing the model and channeling block grant funds to supplement strained library resources; and as a publisher considering their next steps for open access, by implementing the model for those journals that fit.  

These actions all contribute to furthering a model that offers a path to open access that can be sustainable, especially for journals in the social sciences and humanities, with this kind of ongoing support.  

In Part I of this post, we first set out the broader open access publishing environment a publisher like Berghahn finds itself in and how and why the APC-free solution of S2O resonated. We will then share the range and forms of librarian participation and researcher support this model draws from. Finally, in Part II, we will share the disciplinary foundations of our particular pilot and conclude with an update on where we are now and where we should all be headed. 

Continue reading “The Berghahn Open Anthro Journey: Embarking on a discipline-driven equitable open access initiative, Part I” →