From: Ivy Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2016 04:02:04 +0000

Duncan,

There is increasing interest in, and support for, community funding
models within the library community, including ones that convert
subscriptions to open access support.  I think many of us would be
interested to learn more about your model.

Best,

Ivy Anderson
Director of Collections
California Digital Library
University of California
[log in to unmask]  |  http://cdlib.org



From: LibLicense-L Discussion Forum
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of LIBLICENSE
Sent: Wednesday, April 27, 2016 7:24 PM
Subject: "Community Supported Journal" Concept: feedback requested
From: Duncan Hilchey <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2016 15:57:42 -0400

Dear Liblicense Members,

This is Duncan Hilchey Editor in chief of the Journal Journal of
Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development. We are a small
nonprofit journal with most of our income from institutional library
license fees and individual subscriptions. To better meet our mission
(to maximize the distribution of our authors’ work, and have the
biggest impact out in the field of food systems--e.g., informing the
practice of organizations working with small farms, farmers’ markets,
food hubs, and hunger food security organizations, etc.), we are
exploring the development of a new OA model called the "Community
Supported Journal" (CSJ), which includes the following basic features:

* Maintaining JAFSCD’s high standard of quality, including
double-blind peer review;

* Requesting modest submission fees and publishing fees from authors
on an able to pay basis (Food systems scholars do not have
deep-pockets);

* Requesting annual donations from readers;

* Selling “OA Sponsor Shares” to allied academic programs and organizations;

* Making available a broad range of benefits to shareholders,
including promotional opportunities, submission and publishing fee
waivers, and special publishing opportunities (depending of the share
level purchased); and,

* Converting institutional licenses to OA Shares.

We are borrowing the concept from Community Supported Agriculture, in
which a farmer sells shares of the crop in advance—e.g., $500 per year
for a weekly box of vegetables during the harvest season. In our case,
we would be selling so-called “OA shares” of our annual content, which
will then be available to readers around the world. Shareholders are
thus generously underwriting the cost of OA for the benefit of
everyone (with everyone giving what they can). In addition to that
warm fuzzy feeling for helping us make research-based applied
scholarship around the globe, shareholding libraries would receive
acknowledgment for their support.

My question is, do you think libraries would consider converting their
current licenses into OA shares? That is, would they continue to
support us as an Open Access Journal in return for promotion of their
support?

Thanks in advance for your constructive criticism of the CSJ concept.

Best,

Duncan

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Duncan Hilchey
Co-Coordinator, Lyson Center for Civic Agriculture and Food Systems
Editor in chief, Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development
[log in to unmask]

JAFSCD is published by the Thomas A. Lyson Center for Civic
Agriculture and Food Systems, a project of the Center for
Transformative Action, an affiliate of Cornell University.