Florida State Open Publishing (FSOP) provides FSU's faculty, students and staff with the digital publishing tools and support they need to produce peer-reviewed, open scholarly publications, educational resources and other digital research outputs.
FSOP is a digitally focused program that supports a diverse range of publications from all disciplines and languages, with an emphasis on supporting scholarship by or about underrepresented groups. Founded on principles of inclusivity and diversity, it publishes under flexible copyright licenses, allowing authors to retain their copyright while enabling them to share their work with colleagues and research communities for reuse in innovative ways.
FSOP is a digitally focused publishing program
Digital publishing has grown in popularity over the past few decades as a powerful way to share information with a large audience. Social media, blogs, websites, and even podcasts provide platforms that allow users to publish their work in a variety of ways.
For authors, digital publishing enables them to publish their work in the way that best suits them. It also allows them to repurpose and reuse their work, giving their articles new life and reaching a much wider audience.
FSOP supports the digital publishing needs of researchers, scholars, and students across the university. We offer a wide range of services for journal and monograph publication, open educational resources (OER), and digital scholarship projects.
Our mission is to promote the development of new scholarly communication models, to support open access publication and discovery, to explore new technologies and digital scholarship projects, and to facilitate the dissemination of research and creative works in an ethical manner. This program is designed to help FSU faculty, post-doctoral scholars and currently enrolled graduate and undergraduate students to publish their scholarly works in the ways that best suit them.
The digital publishing model has radically changed the way that people share information online, creating new opportunities for innovation and disruption. This trend is particularly significant to scholarly communication, and to university publishing, because it requires a re-imagining of how universities engage with the creation, preservation and dissemination of intellectual content.
In order to adapt to the new digital environment, university administrators and press directors need to make major changes to their existing practices. This requires a strong commitment to leadership, an appreciation of the central role that publishing plays in the mission of the university, and a strategic and financial investment in managing the assets and resources that are entrusted to them.
As a result of these trends, many university presses are struggling to keep up and some influential decision-makers have recommended that university presses be consolidated. Others are exploring collaborations with other parts of their campus and with community partners to create new forms of academic publishing.
FSOP supports a diverse range of publications
FSU's open access policy, endorsed by the Faculty Senate in 2011 and again in 2016, demonstrates our commitment to "preserve, expand, and disseminate knowledge." This policy supports the dissemination of scholarly articles authored by FSU faculty at no cost to readers. It includes a waiver provision for all faculty, allowing them to publish in any journal they choose.
FSOP also supports the publishing of books. The University Press of Florida (UPF) is a state-operated scholarly publisher that serves the twelve member institutions of the Florida State System of Higher Education.
While many of UPF's publications are aimed at scholars and students, they also serve as an important resource for the public. For example, Orange Grove Texts Plus (OGT+) is a series of Open Access textbooks that have been published by UPF and are available on the UPF website.
These materials are also found on the University of Florida Digital Library and in the Sunshine State Digital Network, encouraging scholarly discovery and facilitating reuse for research purposes across the globe. In addition, FSOP publishes under flexible copyright licenses to ensure that authors retain their rights and can freely share their work with their colleagues and research communities.
Moreover, FSOP believes that the publication of scholarly articles and books is essential to advance our knowledge base, foster collaboration, and facilitate the development of new knowledge. This is especially true in today's digital environment, where the global research enterprise has become increasingly digitized and centralized.
However, this digitization process is not without challenges. For example, it is often difficult to assess a manuscript's archival value - particularly when it contains unique documents that are not easily accessible or available elsewhere.
To address these challenges, FSOP works to ensure that its publishing policies and processes promote inclusivity in both editorial and peer review – and that authors are aware of the opportunities and risks of open publishing. Similarly, the program is committed to promoting diversity in its own operations and staff through training, communication and ongoing monitoring.
FSOP is also working to develop a community of practice for editors, publishers and other stakeholders, fostering shared expertise and building a robust system of best practices in scholarly communications. Through the establishment of a virtual network, editors and other stakeholders will be empowered to discuss their experiences with diversity in scholarly communications in a safe space, while sharing policies, language, standards and practices that can be applied universally.
FSOP supports scholarly communication
The Florida State Open Publishing (FSOP) program supports the scholarly communication needs of the FSU community by publishing and disseminating a wide range of digital content. This includes open access, open educational resources, and data from FSU-funded research projects.
The FSOP team also helps to facilitate research collaborations among scholars at all FSU campuses, and serves as a resource for students interested in publishing in digital journals and other formats. FSOP also hosts monthly discussions about current trends and issues in scholarly communications.
FSOP publishes under flexible copyright licenses, allowing authors to choose the terms of their publication. This approach allows researchers to keep their rights, and make their work more widely accessible and findable. Moreover, it allows libraries to recoup the cost of publishing and maintain high-quality collections without the need for large budgets.
With an increasing number of publishers charging subscription or paywall fees for articles, new models have emerged to recoup this costs for researchers who would otherwise publish their work in a traditional journal. These alternative models provide greater flexibility for researchers to pursue their research interests and support FSU Libraries in recouping publisher fees and building new, more financially sustainable models of scholarly communication.
For example, a transformative agreement with Cambridge University Press provides a “Publish and Read” option for FSU affiliates to waive article processing charges (APCs) for their accepted manuscripts in participating CUP journals. This transformative agreement is just one of many partnerships that FSU Libraries has with publishers to address the changing needs of our researchers and the wider community.
Another example is the Open Humanities project, a network of universities and scholars working to advance the practice of open scholarship in the humanities. This group of scholars and librarians share experiences with open publishing, open source code, and open data in their areas of interest.
The Open Access movement grew out of a response to the increasing cost of scholarly journals and publications while library budgets remained flat or decreased. It also aims to make scholarly works that are funded by institutions and grants more widely available and promotes giving researchers and creators more permissions for reuse.