We, the undersigned of this Initiative, consider a sustainable and future-oriented system of scholalrly book publishing extremely important for our institutions and wish to actively participate in its development and promotion.
On the one hand, within our own publishing activities, we aim to ensure the greatest possible visibility for our publications, both nationally and globally, open access, and compliance with internationally recognized quality standards in editorial processes, metadata preparation, dissemination, and technological support.
On the other hand, our institutions, which are largely focused on the social sciences and humanities, are inherentlyfocused on the survival of scientific books published by other Croatian publishers who operate under particularly challenging circumstances, targeting a small market and limited audience (due to publishing in Croatian and the small number of scientists in certain fields). Our teachers and researchers, in the roles of authors, editors, and reviewers, are natural allies of Croatian publishers.
The objectives of the initiative are:
- Creating a community of practice for the exchange of experiences and good professional, organizational, and technological practices.
- Developing a common infrastructure for open access and preservation of scholarly books from all scholarly publishers in Croatia (private enterprises, public organizations, and associations). This infrastructure should be open, non-profit, interoperable, and based on existing successful infrastructures and organizational solutions in scholarship. It should be transparently governed by the academic community, ensuring the participation of the private publishing sector.
- Ensuring financial mechanisms and support systems that will provide stability for the book publishing system (given the small readership), in both the public and private sectors, while ensuring open access.
- Providing a system of professional, organizational, and technological support in the field of digital publishing, available to all stakeholders in the public and private publishing sectors.
We invite all other scholarly institutions and publishers, as well as all other stakeholders involved in the creation of scientific books, to join the Initiative!