Six reasons why open institutional publishing matters – Times Higher Education

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A new wave of institutional publishers is changing the way we think about academic publishing. Here’s why they’re worth watching
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University press publishing has been in the UK for centuries, with the first presses founded in 1534 and 1586 at Cambridge and Oxford universities respectively. But the sector in the UK has had a chequered history. While the mid-sized five – Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, Edinburgh and Wales – are exemplary, thriving examples, the idea of university-based publishing has gone in and out of fashion over the decades (despite much internal discussion, as this blog on the history of publishing at LSE shows). This is in marked contrast to the US, where there are over 100 university presses, and publishing is seen as part of the core activities of their home institutions – as essential as a library or a lecture theatre.
But over the past 10 years, things have started to change. With the coming of digital publishing and new technologies, the rise of open research and increasing demand for open access, and with growing criticism of commercial publishing, institutionally based publishing is making a long-overdue comeback.
A new wave of institutional publishers focused on open access publishing – including LSE Press, Open Press at the University of Sussex and UCL Press, among many others – are leading the way in offering alternative publishing venues to authors and driving change in scholarly communications.
In fact, this sector is growing at such a pace that, in 2023, a group of these presses came together to form the Open Institutional Publishing Association (OIPA) to help represent and promote these presses to a broader audience and create an important new publishing network.
This group includes publishers who are “born” open access – ie, only publish in this way – as well as those transitioning to, or striving for, a fully open access model, and those with a hybrid model who publish non-open access work too. It also includes a range of different types of publisher – from a traditional university press set-up to library publishers and open journals service providers – and different open access business models, or combination of models from diamond, to gold, to green. 
What unites this new breed of publishers? What can open institutional publishing offer, how is it making a difference and why does it matter? Here are six reasons why these presses are ones to watch:
If you would like to know more about OIPA, including how to join, please contact us at oipa.contact@gmail.com
Philippa Grand is head of publishing at LSE Press and Suzanne Tatham is deputy director of library and learning services at the University of Southampton.
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