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

OurThe aim,aim of this resource, therefore, is to pull together some of the key insights that have already been compiledcompiled, bothwhether in existingother toolkits,toolkits butor alsoin in some of the wider sets of reports and resources that have emergedbeen produced in recent years. More specifically, theThe toolkit canis be seen asthere a kind of guide of guides.

There are different ways to navigate our toolkit. One routeway is to begin with our ‘GeneralKey ResourceResources Overview’and Sources’, which includes a short summary ofsummarises the resources that we have found useful that cover multiple parts of the publishing workflow.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 thematically.by theme. These themes canare beall accessedlaid viaout on the lefttoolkit hand menu.homepage. For each of these themes,theme, we discuss some of thecover key issues that small/academic-led 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. For Ineach these themes,theme, we allalso introduceprovide andlinks summaryto other existing more thematically focusedrelevant resources.