Open science must be actively produced and shaped. That is why all our publications appear in hybrid form: online and print. Open Access means making scientific publications accessible, whereby accessibility means more to us than just free availability. Our OA publications can of course all be downloaded as PDFs – but we also care about looks and innovative website design. Above all, however, we understand accessibility in a social sense: we are committed to communicating our publications through events and other discursive formats.

The golden path and hybrid publications
At intercom, open access publications are published “gold” OA, i.e. the electronic version is published at the same time as or before the printed book.

Our research and development work in the field of hybrid open-access publishing has been funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), ETH Zurich and the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). Our monographic series Mono was awarded the Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2022 prize.

Visibility, long-term archiving and licensing
To ensure the visibility of our publications, they are searchable via the relevant catalogs and search engines. The digital editions of our publications are available as PDF files on our publisher’s website and are also linked as a separate HTML website. They can also be accessed via the online storage service Zenodo, a repository that ensures the long-term archiving of our Open Access publications and provides them with a DOI (Digital Object Identifier). The DOIs are enriched with metadata to ensure that the publications are easy to find. Our OA publications are provided with the CC-BY-NC-ND license.

Quality assurance
Scientific publications must meet the standards of good scientific work. The core of quality assurance at intercom is the editorial team, which is responsible for all selection and publication processes, as well as our scientific advisory board, consisting of international researchers from various disciplines.
At the same time, we are developing new peer review procedures adapted to our three publication formats:

• In the monographic series Mono, peer review consists of two components: Firstly, the texts are closely supervised and proofread by members of the editorial team. Secondly, external, specialized peer reviewers are consulted for the selection of texts.
• The publication format for research groups – cache – undergoes three quality assurance steps: First, the individual projects are reviewed / selected by the editorial team. The second step consists of a series of authors’ workshops, internal to the research groups. The third step involves the inclusion of external experts, that is, the standard peer review process. Optionally, both the cache web and print layouts allow for the inclusion of comments, responses, and even brief essays by authors external to the core group, adding yet another layer of “peer” input.
• In the case of Æther, our research and writing format for students, all texts undergo a two-stage peer review process. The lecturers take the lead as editors, guiding the creation of the text and introducing the students to the standards of academic publishing. In addition, the intercom editorial team comments on and accompanies the creation and production of the issue.

Editing
Beyond technical discussions and metrics, standards and licenses, our main concern is to do justice to the core task of an academic publisher: editing. Academic editing means close reading and intensive exchange with the author or editor from the first draft to publication. For obvious reasons but to the detriment of authors and readers, editing in this sense has been marginalized in academic publishing. For us, “open science” also means understanding publishing as a social process in order to produce high-quality and appealing books.

Funding and promotion
Due to intercom’s hybrid publishing strategy, book projects incur very different technical, design, administrative and production-related costs. We develop each book project individually with the authors and advise them on our publication formats. For this reason, the open access costs vary for each publication and it is not possible to give a general indication of their amount. We support authors in obtaining funding.