Revitalising university-based publishing: the Ubiquity Network

Licensed for reuse on pixabay.com

These are my notes on the UKSG Forum 2014 presentation by Brian Hole, CEO and Founder Ubiquity Press Ltd
http://www.ubiquitypress.com/

Ubiquity Press is an open access publisher of peer-reviewed academic journals, books and data. They operate a model that aims to make quality open access publishing affordable for everyone.  They provide the infrastructure and services to enable university and society presses to run sustainably and successfully.

UP is a researcher lead press. Many of the personnel who make up the leadership arm of the company are current or former researchers from a variety of disciplines. UP want to help bring publishing back to Universities using a model that is low-risk and sustainable.

This combination of publishing and research experience gives them a strong sense of the priorities for the services they are developing. For example they are also focused on research data and ways to ensure this are publishable and citable. UP want to build a structure that supports the researcher and their chosen mechanisms for the communication of their ideas. As researchers, they insist that all outputs they publish are done so open access at the point of publication and this is a corner stone of their business model. Closed access publications are considered a form of scientific malpractice by UP.

There are immediate benefits to authors and the general public that come from backing an open model. Among other measures, UP make use of AltMetrics track the narratives of output reuse in real time. This is of great interest to the research communities they support. By applying this data to their published outputs, the UP system helps to incentive research dissemination.

So far the costs for a monograph are between £3000-£10000 and they are working hard to keep costs as low as possible in order to ensure these services are available to universities. They expect these costs to be met from open access publishing budgets within institutions. UP services handle all aspects regarding infrastructure and allow for the partnered institution to overlay their branding and style requirements. This helps to boost the online profile and reputation of the institution. The metadata can be pushed through to a research management system and the full text can be pushed through to the institutional repository, if required. The production is also handled by a dedicated team of professionals meaning quality is consistent and assured - enabling access across different platforms and conformity with accessibility standards.

The way that costs will be kept down is by the size of the ecosystem that UB hopes to inhabit. The economy of scale means that as more institutions sign up the costs of production and dissemination across their workflow should fall.

The UB system also works with ethics committees of individual universities to ensure a rigorous peer review process that can be shared across all partnered institutions. This means that standards of academic quality are maintained by the community at large. The networks of institutions are growing steadily and they aim to have 30-40 signed up by the end of 2015.

They see themselves as a community of presses and believe that by working together they will be able to maximise the reach and impact of the publisher outputs of their researchers.