A unique academic reference resource, whose editorship has shifted to New Zealand as it approaches its 25th year, could stand as an alternative to the multibillion-dollar mainstream scholarly publishing industry.

An initiator of , launched online in 2000 by British and American academics, said its contributor-owned model should be considered as a financing mechanism for academic journals.

“It’s a debate that ought to be had…because the present model is really not good,” said publisher and founding editor Robert Clark, former reader in English at the University of East Anglia.

“Academic publishing has become part of international global financing. [It] has lost relationships, definitely, with individual readers and is overproducing in an extraordinary manner. It’s only really interested in the bottom line. Selling the entire platform of their products to a university library – that’s how they make money.”

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First published in September 2000, the encyclopedia contains about 10,000 biographies of writers and scholarly articles about their work and its historical and cultural underpinnings. The focus is global, covering literature in the dominant European tongues and dozens of others including Icelandic, Sami and the languages of the Indian subcontinent.

Contributions are peer-reviewed and commissioned by more than 100 section editors. The encyclopedia is non-profit and owned by its contributors, whose articles are remunerated in payments of up to 20 shares – depending on the length and complexity of the articles – which deliver annual royalties.

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Current editor Grace Moore said earning money was not the point for most contributors, many of whom diverted their royalty payments into the encyclopedia’s scholarship fund. She said access was the main aim, with authors charged nothing and users only modestly.

Annual individual subscriptions cost $29 (£22), waived for people from low-income countries. “We are behind a paywall because we have salaries to pay, but we’re a lot cheaper than our competitors,” she said, adding that the encyclopedia had formed a “futures committee” to investigate ways of becoming open access.

Unlocking the potential of open access and open research

Dr Moore, a University of Otago academic who assumed the editorship in January after five years as section editor for Victorian-era literature, said she hoped to strengthen the publication’s “holding” of Māori and Indigenous Australian writing. She said the encyclopedia elicited a “strong emotional connection” from its contributors.

“[I feel] a great sense of gratitude to the publication for having published me right at the beginning of my career, while I was just kind of breaking ground,” she said. “Because it’s been around for so long, people who were early career scholars when the publication was…founded are now luminaries in the field.”

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The encyclopedia, which predates Wikipedia, was launched after major publishers pulled out of Dr Clark’s proposals for English literature databases over technical issues or perceived lack of profitability. He and his photographer wife, Marianne Majerus, initially funded the project from their own pockets.

He said similar operations could be run for as little as £100,000 a year, and could be made open access through a donation scheme or some other means of guaranteeing “permanency”.

“In an ideal world, consortia of universities would explore funding such initiatives…so they can be made freely available to the world,” he said.

“[They] would get a huge return in global esteem and gratitude and be visibly fulfilling their founding purposes. This is the spirit in which university presses were originally founded.”

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john.ross@timeshighereducation.com