One Year Later

Last year, during open access week, the Radical Open Access Collective re-launched with a new website, a directory of academic-led presses and an information platform for OA (book) publishing. We would like to share with you some of ROAC’s highlights for this year. Let us know if we’ve missed something or if there is anything you would like to add to this overview.

• • The Radical OA Collective grew its membership substantially: at our launch in October last year we had 25+ members, our community now consists of 54 members, Open Access in Media Studies being the latest to join!

• • We organised the 2^nd Radical Open Access Conference at The Post Office (CPC – Coventry University) on the Ethics of Care, which was co-organised with 7 members of and/or affiliates to the Radical OA Collective. You can find more information about the conference here: https://radicaloa.postdigitalcultures.org/conferences/roa2/

• • For Radical OA II we published 7 pamphlets, available during the conference in both print and OA, covering topics such as Metrics Noir, Competition and Collaboration and the Geopolitics of Open. Each pamphlet was edited by a ROAC member or affiliate. The OA versions of the pamphlets are available on the Humanities Commons platform here: https://hcommons.org/deposits/?facets[author_facet][]=Post+Office+Press

• • We presented the ROAC at a number of conferences, including: COASP (Vienna), Digital Cultures (Lüneburg), Crossroads in Cultural Studies (Shanghai), OA Monographs (UUK, London), NECS Post-conference: Open Media Studies(Hilversum), Radical Open Access II (Coventry), Beyond APCs Open Aire workshop (The Hague), Open Access Tage (Dresden)

• • The ScholarLed Consortium was formed by 6 members of the ROAC pooling skills and resources to develop open infrastructure, tools, workflows and processes for OA publishing: https://scholarled.org/

• • We organised a bookstand together with our friends from ScholarLed which was set up at the 2^nd Radical OA Conference in Coventry and at Crossroads in Cultural Studies in Shanghai. In Coventry we ran 2 short talks alongside the bookstand, and in Shanghai we organised a round table on OA publishing in Cultural Studies.

• Looking forward, we hope to continue to welcome new members to the collective and develop our suite of tools to encourage and support others to start their own publishing projects. If you run a not-for-profit OA publishing initiative or are interested in starting your own scholar-led publishing project, we encourage you to join the Radical OA mailing list and get involved with the discussion!

  About the ROAC

  Formed in 2015, the Radical OA Collective is a community of scholar-led, not-for-profit presses, journals and other open access projects in the humanities and social sciences. We represent an alternative open access ecosystem and seek to create a different future for open access, one based on experimenting with not-for-profit, scholar-led approaches to publishing. You can read more about the philosophy behind the collective here: https://radicaloa.co.uk/philosophy/

  As a collective, we offer mutual reliance and support for each other’s projects by sharing the knowledge and resources we have acquired. Through our projects we also aim to provide advice, support and encouragement to academics and other not-for-profit entities interested in setting up their own publishing initiatives. Our website contains a Directory of academic-led presses, which showcases the breadth and rich diversity in scholar-led presses currently operating in an international context and across numerous fields, and an Information Portal with links to resources on funding opportunities for open access books, open source publishing tools, guidelines on editing standards, ethical publishing and diversity in publishing, and OA literature useful to not-for-profit publishing endeavours.