A Collaborative Solution to Scholarly Publishing’s Challenges: Building the Lever Press

Abstract

In 2014, the Oberlin Group - a consortium of selective liberal-arts college libraries - convened a task force to explore the possibility of developing a collaborative, open access publishing pathway for scholarship in the arts and humanities. After a year of work and study, developing a request for proposals and selecting a publishing partner, crafting a business model and returning to the member libraries for commitments of support, the Lever Press will be launched in early 2016 with thirty-nine library partners making a five-year commitment totaling more than a million dollars in overall resources.

Our panel proposes to tell the story (so far) of how the Lever Press came to be, and how its principal partners—the Oberlin Group, the Amherst College Press, and Michigan Publishing—are collaborating to develop a plan for realizing this vision. We’ll offer presentations on the content problems librarians have experienced and are working to solve; the assumptions that guide our work; the partnership between the two library-based presses that will implement the vision; and the next steps we see ahead of us in translating our proposals for governance and editorial oversight into an operational library publishing entity.