Path to Open Pilot Project

The Project

In 2023, leadership of the Path to Open pilot project hired consultants from Educopia for a year-long project to to support the project’s sustainability, strengthen its governance model, and meaningfully engage a diversity of stakeholders. As part of this work, Path to Open also sought support for clarifying the project’s value proposition, scoping a shared decision-making plan, and developing a roadmap for the next phase of work.

The Outcome

Through a deliberative and collaborative process, Educopia outlined and ensured community participation in project decision-making through governance modeling, community building, and roadmapping for future priorities.  Our work took shape over several phases:

1. We began by interviewing a diversity of Path to Open’s participants and stakeholders to document and gain a broader view into the project’s value, challenges, and standing practices.
2. We created a plan of action and facilitated the process of sunsetting the initial working group, implementing a new model for community participation (by convening and facilitating a community advisory group). 
3. Finally, we helped the new leadership identify priorities for the coming 1-3 years, and developed a benchmarked work plan. Topics included assessment, outreach and community development, and criteria and policies.

Project Background

Path to Open (P2O) is a new project that draws on the collective power of book publishers, libraries, and scholars to map the way toward a sustainable ecosystem for open access scholarly books. It was initially developed through a partnership between the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the University of Michigan Press, The University of North Carolina Press, and JSTOR. P2O seeks to address the fact that traditional cost-recovery models of publishing and grant funded pilots to make books OA have yet to result in a sustainable system-wide shift in opening humanities and social science monographs. This is due to logistical and financial challenges; lack of robust social infrastructures across networks of key stakeholders; and structural challenges in academia that include precarity in the profession.

Ambitious, ground-breaking, and led by a distributed, cross-institutional team of leaders, the project had already seen great success before its work with Educopia began. But the project’s leaders knew it would not be able to sustain its early success if it didn’t develop a more inclusive decision-making model built on shared power among members of its stakeholder communities. As Educopia’s initial interviews with stakeholders revealed, Path to Open’s unique value emerges from its mission to draw “on the collective power of book publishers, libraries, and scholars to map the way toward a sustainable ecosystem for open access scholarly books.” Busy as they were with their many (non-Path to Open) work responsibilities, the project’s founding leaders did not have the capacity to sustainably realize their desired leadership model. This is where Educopia consultants came in. Leveraging our experience with both open access publishing and community-based, multi-stakeholder collaboration, Educopia was well-positioned to support Path to Open in its efforts to scope and implement the foundations for this endeavor.

What We Learned

This project demonstrates the value of investing in thoughtfully structured conversation and communication processes for organizational development. We began this project with a discovery phase that consisted largely of conversations with the initiative’s participants, stakeholders, and peer projects. Over the course of 7 weeks, we convened 9 focus groups and interviews, where we tested (and revised) the existing value proposition statement, and asked participants a set of questions about their experiences with (and observations about) the challenges, opportunities, and impact of open access publishing. This process was essential to the success of our work. 

The eye-opening results of these focus group conversations formed an essential foundation for the rest of our work. Effectively scaffolded communication and conversation remained important throughout the project. For instance, once we began convening the new Community Advisory Committee, we created a set of structured but flexible containers (conversational prompts, workplans, etc.)  to support the group’s deliberation and decision-making. In that way, we were able to accomplish a great deal in a short period of time while also leaving room for committee members to bring up issues and questions we had not anticipated, and integrate them into the emerging plan. 

Our Takeaways

Among the outcomes of the project was a tripartite governance structure, formally established in a Memorandum of Understanding created during this engagement, that outlined roles and responsibilities for each leadership branch. The description of the Community Advisory Committee’s role contained in this document emerged from a process we facilitated with the interim Community Advisory Committee. It reads, in part:

“Path to Open’s community advisory committee supports the longevity, effectiveness, and sustainability of the Path to Open initiative. It is comprised of representative community members who provide feedback, recommendations, and insight as well as outreach and community-building support for the Path to Open pilot.”