Introduction: A guide of guides

There already exist a number of richly detailed guides, reports, and resources that provide valuable insights about the practicalities of launching and running a small and/or academic-led press. However, one of the challenges for OA presses, particularly if they are new, smaller or run by academics, is that the sheer amount of information already available can be overwhelming.

Our aim, therefore, is to pull together some of the key insights that have already been compiled both in existing toolkits, but also in some of the wider sets of reports and resources that have emerged in recent years. More specifically, the toolkit can be seen as a guide of guides.

There are different ways to navigate our toolkit. One route is to begin with our ‘General Resource Overview’, which includes a short summary of the resources that we have found useful that cover multiple parts of the publishing workflow. Another is to browse the toolkit thematically. These themes can be accessed via the left hand menu. For each of these themes, we discuss some of the key issues that publishers might want to attend to, alongside one or more case studies, and what we call ‘Questions towards good practice’. These questions aim to provide a quick way of ensuring that relevant issues and practicalities have been properly considered.  In these themes, we all introduce and summary other existing more thematically focused resources.