OSCU Publishing is an initiative to support and contextualise cooperatives of academic citizens, i.e. autonomously governed people within and around knowledge organisations in Utrecht, who carry out their own publishing project. The Open Science Community Utrecht provides guidance and consultation, and a degree of social and technical infrastructure to bring a project to fruition. The cooperative itself is responsible for the labour and governance involved in the publishing process, including research, writing, copy editing, review, typesetting, design, and project management.
The project is built from the publishing model Cooperative Open University Publishing, first announced at the Open Science Festival in Rotterdam in 2023. Cooperative Open University Publishing springs from the assertion that publishing projects can now be holistically developed within knowledge organisations due to (1) the current maturity of our digital infrastructure; (2) wider literacy of publishing processes and their ethical implications; (3) new forms and content for scholarly publishing; and (4) an emerging landscape of roles at knowledge organisations – scholars and practitioners with titles such as data stewards, research software engineers, and community managers – who can participate in the publishing process. These factors, in concert with cooperative governance models, alleviate dependence on commercial entities, render publishing as an immediate process, and build new alliances toward knowledge generation.
By putting this model into motion, OSCU Publishing will help bring together communities of practice and empower them toward publishing their work. Researchers will have agency over the publishing workflow and ability to innovate in content and form. OSCU Publishing will assist in placing those projects on a publication platform and collect and catalogue those publications under the OSCU Publishing imprint.