Mar 27, 2024

Global Social Challenges Journal has been accepted into the Lyrasis Open Access Community Investment

Bristol University Press is delighted to announce that its flagship open access journal Global Social Challenges Journal (GSCJ) has been accepted into Lyrasis's 2024 Open Access Community Investment Program (OACIP). With support from OACIP, we will be seeking funding to convert the Journal to a Diamond open access model, which allows research to be published with no fees for either reader or author. For more information, read Lyrasis’s blog.

From its launch, GSCJ has endeavoured to break down barriers to sharing knowledge, championing inter- and transdisciplinary research and decolonial and southern epistemologies to create a just and sustainable future. Diamond open access publishing removes another barrier to truly equitable publishing, ensuring that GSCJ is accessible to all, regardless of funder, institution or country. We are thrilled that our journey toward Diamond open access will be supported by OACIP, an initiative that perfectly aligns with our values.

OACIP provides a community-driven framework that enables multiple stakeholders - including libraries, academic departments and funding agencies - to evaluate and collectively fund Diamond open access (OA) journals. The programme is designed to be:

• Sustainable - investments in OACIP support labour costs, infrastructure, contingency and innovation costs for each journal in the programme.
• Principle-aligned - the OACIP Criteria Form enables investors to make principled spending decisions and strategically fund programmes that align with their missions.
• Inclusive - OACIP provides a hub for Diamond OA content published by nonprofit, academic-led publishers to sustain bibliodiversity, equity and inclusion of scholarship.
• Collaborative - OACIP enables an array of communities to share the costs of funding scholarship
• Efficient - OACIP centralises the administration and funding of individual journals or across the entire OACIP portfolio.
• OACIP evaluates OA journals from mission-driven scholarly publishers and helps them secure funding from entities that want to support OA publishing which aligns with their mission and values.

We are now inviting stakeholders to pledge to support GSCJ financially. The funding will also provide additional language support where required, finance translation and publication in languages other than English and set up mentoring programmes for authors, reviewers and editors.

If you would like to support GSCJ or any of other journals in OACIP please visit: https://www.lyrasis.org/content/Pages/product-details.aspx?pid=44F686AD-61B9-EE11-8112-00155DCF5744