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 Open Access presses, particularly if they are new, smaller or run by academics, is that the sheer amount of information already available can be overwhelming.

The aim of this resource, therefore, is to pull together some of the key insights that have already been compiled, whether in other toolkits or in in some of the wider sets of reports and resources that have been produced in recent years. The toolkit is there a kind of guide of guides.

There are different ways to navigate our toolkit. One way is to begin with our ‘Key Resources and Sources’, which summarises the resources that we have found useful that cover multiple parts of the publishing workflow, as well as giving an overview of a few of the most important sources we have used.

Another way is to browse the toolkit by theme. These themes are all laid out on the toolkit homepage. For each theme, we cover key issues that small/academic-led publishers might want to attend to, alongside 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. For each theme, we also provide links to relevant resources.