This paper focuses on a crowdfunding initiative for Open Access E-Books in educational research. It involves research communities and academic libraries for establishing a community of subscribers to share the publication fees of open e-books. The background is the ongoing transformation of the scholarly publication landscape towards Open Access (Suber 2012), which fundamentally changes funding in publishing. There is a demand for free access and circulation of scientific knowledge supported by most national research funding agencies and the European Commission (see Sherpa Juliet 2022), while publishers adjust their business models, academic libraries and research communities promote the idea and follow new conditions. Studies have argued for a seamless financial shift without the need of extra resources (Schimmer et al. 2015). But several deficits become visible when looking at the full range of publication types and cultures. Sustainable financial models are lacking and a fundamental shift in financing is realised: while the physical book is paid through its usage, the digital open access book is funded through publication fees. Given this new condition, the author - instead of the reader - pays for the publication.  The pay wall and its barrier for participation changes from reading to publishing through paying the so called article or book processing charges (APC, BPC). This change impacts more intensively the Social Sciences and Humanities because of the less established publication fees in these research communities.

 A solution for authors to overcome this financial challenge could be seen in collective or crowdfunding approaches, shifting the publication fees to several shoulders (Bulock 2018, Kändler 2020, Aasheim et al. 2020).

A crowdfunding approach to funding of Open Access has been realised through Knowledge Unlatched (KU), a service provider company for OA (2022). As a publisher you can create packages of publications and offer them for pledging by academic libraries. If a minimum of libraries participate in the pledging, the e-books will be created and published in OA format. The more libraries participate in financing the OA e-books, the better is the price. KU organises the pledging process including communication with the libraries and access to the publications on their website. While KU collaborated in the past with around a hundred publishers, the company was bought in December 2021 by the international publishing house Wiley (2021).

In this paper we describe a crowdfunding approach for supporting OA authors by establishing a community of subscribers to share the publication fees of OA e-books in educational research. While the situation for oa books can be described as problematic (Schindler, Rummler 2018), we align various actors at the value chain of scientific publishing in a new way.

The initiative is realised through the cooperative project “Specialised Information Service for Education Science” (FID Erziehungswissenschaft und Bildungsforschung, 2022) funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within its specialized information services programme. The FID consortium consists of the Information Center for Education at DIPF, the Research Library for the History of Education at DIPF, the University Libraries at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg and Humboldt-University Berlin and the Research Library at the Leibniz-Institute for Educational Media (GEI). The FID is integrated into the Education Research Portal (2022), which offers a broad cooperative network with around 30 partners for the production of its reference database and further 40 publishers for the OA repository peDOCS.

For aligning the various actors at the value chain of scientific publishing in a new way, a participatory design approach is used, which takes into account the transformation through digitisation (Callon 2004). Thereby, we re-arranged the stakeholder interests - ranging from authors and research communities to publishers and to libraries – and re-balanced the oa transformation costs. The participatory design approach has been realised in several iterations and feedback loops involving the full range of stakeholders. After analyzing the current oa funding initiatives and creating the first draft of the settings and criteria of the crowdfunding, short interviews with publishers and librarians were conducted. Based on their feedback, the draft was formulated into a proposal and discussed with educational researchers of the advisory council of the FID. After the positive evaluation, the concept was enriched with a process description and with more detailed criteria for selecting the publications through a representative committee of the research communities. Afterwards the concept was adjusted in a workshop with publishers and further developed in a workshop with the selection committee. Besides the concrete data of the crowdfunding process, final group discussions are planned with the stakeholders.

While libraries balanced access to physical books by paying and offering publications on their shelves, the question is how they expand their role in the digital and open world? The initiative aims in the long run to establish a subscription model based on academic libraries, where they are part of a community to maintain and support the circulation of open scholarly knowledge. The DFG funding offers the possibility to initialise the establishment of this community of subscription by supporting two packages of 20 e-books. 5.000 Euro are payed overall for an Open Access E-book, whereby the first round of the oa package is funded by 50% and the second by 33%. In addition, three main changes have been made in comparison to other approaches: 1) Instead of limitation of the publications to one publisher, the package of 20 titles is subject-oriented to educational research and is open to every relevant publisher. 2) The research communities are an active part of the process and select the publications based on traceable criteria. Thereby, the selection for funding offers the chance for researchers to gain visibility and reputation. 3) The academic libraries in educational research create a community of subscribers, which is addressed through active communication and community building. The participating libraries, which finance an oa-package, are published, communicated in mailing lists and printed in each funded e-book. In comparison with other approaches, the library knows each title of the e-books and does not buy a black-box selected through the publisher. Furthermore, the subject orientation of the package offers a broader scope in educational research and has the chance for a wider participation of libraries in the pledging. Thereby the aim is that the price of an e-book does not exceed that of a campus licence.

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