Case studies

• Ubiquity Press, an academic-led press and a publishing platform was launched in 2008 to support one small society-owned journal which could not find a sustainable provider to go online and flip to Open Access. Initially, they were focused on journals and used the OJS system (Jisc Interviews, Brian Hole).

• punctum books was launched by a group of academics who saw a need for a “fringe” press that would publish work that was not very popular with universities and mainstream publishers “cultivating the avant-garde, the weird, the misfit, the vagabond” (Jisc Interviews, Eileen Joy). 

• MediaCommons Press is an offspring of MediaCommons, a community network for scholars, students, and practitioners in media studies, promoting exploration of new forms of publishing within the field. MediaCommons was founded in 2006 in collaboration with the Institute for the Future of the Book, and was relaunched in 2008 with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the collaboration of the NYU Libraries Digital Library Technology Services. (Jisc Interviews, Kathleen Fitzpatrick).

• meson press also​​ grew out of a project – the Hybrid Publishing Lab, which was a research lab looking into digital publishing and Open Access, funded by the European Union (Jisc Interviews, Mercedes Bunz). 

• Open Book Publishers, the largest independent academic-led press in the UK, was launched and run by a group of academics disillusioned with costs of books published by commercial presses (Jisc Interviews, Rupert Gatti).

• Language Science Press was established with a subsidy from the Freie Universität Berlin and transferred to the Humboldt Univeristät zu Berlin, which offered to continue sponsoring the press. Both institutions are linked to one of the founders and directors, Prof. Stefan Müller (Jisc Interviews, Sebastian Nordhoff).

• Counter press evolved from the Critical Legal Thinking blog after the editors realised that their content was highly popular with readers and could be easily turned into a book format (Jisc Interviews, Stephen Connelly).