Who are we?

We are a group of like-minded individuals from libraries, academic institutions, publishers, and consortia. We have organized to provide support, advocacy, and referral services (reflected in our charge) within the publishing community and related professional organizations.

How it started

Our group, aptly called Transitioning Society Publications to Open Access (or, TSPOA), took root at the October 2018 Choosing Pathways to OA working forum. The forum brought together more than 125 library and consortium leaders and key academic stakeholders to engage in action-oriented deliberations about a range of OA funding strategies so they could leave with customized plans for how they intend to support the global transition towards openness.

A diverse group of participants expressed particular interest in providing support to trusted society publishers, given the uncertainty these publishers are facing under the current scholarly communications climate.

What united us as forum participants was a desire to act–our intention to leverage our collective experience and expertise in order to yield a more open society journal universe.

Working within the landscape

We are OA publishing model agnostic: We are not promoting any particular OA funding model, such as collectives or article processing charges. Rather, we aim to provide relevant resources/experience working in collaboration with society publishing partners to help them develop an open access publishing model that is appropriate, effective and sustainable.

Through consultations, advocacy, piloting new ventures, and information sharing, we aim to connect society journal editors and publishers (and any libraries or consortia that support or fund them) with useful resources related to transitioning society publications to OA.

In doing so, we celebrate the work already being done by our colleagues elsewhere (e.g. SPARC, ARL, UC Office of Scholarly Communication) in offering guidance to society journals making the OA transition. Our efforts should complement existing undertakings, and hopefully can help draw even more attention to contributions in this regard.

Scope of services

We are offering our services as individuals engaged in the scholarly publishing community, not necessarily on behalf of our academic institutions or organizations.