Alternative publishing platforms represent a move away from the traditional journal as an organising principle and might differ from traditional scholarly journals in a number of ways, including publication process, governance, and underlying infrastructure. They can be regarded as examples of real innovative, open access scholarly communication or as effective "threat infrastructures" to traditional journals. These different platforms all have different aims, such as seeking to remove the barriers, constraints and costs imposed by legacy academic publishing companies, to reduce questionable practices, or make research work more deeply accessible and reusable. They also feature different ways of operation, different innovations, different business models and different structures of governance. Describing this diversity and knowing the directions in which these platforms are driving innovation, will allow us insight into what can be a confusing landscape.
In 2022,
Knowledge Exchange started a project exploring what Alternative Publishing Platforms do and how they can be placed in the open scholarly communication ecosystem. In order to help guide conversations, we first published a Knowledge Exchange (KE)
scoping paper on this. The next step is to identify and better understand the individual platforms.
This call for entries is open to any platform working in open access publishing / communication who wishes to be included in The Knowledge Exchange taxonomy of Alternative Publishing Platforms.
The application form below is not personal – it should be filled on behalf of the entity operating the platform. Information provided in the application will be used to decide inclusion in the taxonomy, and for research purposes. Personal information (name, role, email address, etc.) about you will be treated as confidential and will only be used to verify you are entitled to give answers on behalf the platform, and to contact you to inform you about the progress of the project and announcing project results.
Your participation is voluntary. You are entitled to ask that part, or all, of the answers you gave for the application be deleted.