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
<http://www.lysoncenter.org>

Editor in chief, *Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community
Development <http://www.agdevjournal.com>*

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JAFSCD <http://www.agdevjournal.com> is published by the Thomas A. Lyson
Center for Civic Agriculture and Food Systems, a project of the Center for
Transformative Action <http://www.centerfortransformativeaction.org/>, an
affiliate of Cornell University.