Quartz OA is building a platform cooperative bringing together independent open access academic publishers and a community of scholars and institutions willing to provide them with financial and in-kind support. Our goal is to make open access academic publishing fairer and more sustainable and help the academic community retain the value it generates. Ultimately, our goal is to facilitate the creation of an ecosystem where all parties benefit from being part of it:

• Libraries, institutions, and funders will be able to automatically channel funds to those open access journals that are relevant to their researchers, optimizing their open access strategy and minimising administrative burden.
• Individual academics will be able to contribute to the sustainability of independent open access publishing initiatives and get recognition for their contributions.
• Trusted independent journals and publishers will be able to access additional streams of funding, as well as a network of scholars willing to contribute to fair open access initiatives by providing services (such as peer review, language support and even copyediting) or by participating in crowdfunding campaigns.

To enable this vision, we are building upon the cutting-edge technologies and approaches to organisation, such as web monetization technology and the platform cooperative framework. In this session, we will present Quartz OA and introduce the concept of platform coops and their potential for the transformation of the academic publishing field. We will also invite the participants to a conversation about fairness, economic sustainability and independence of open access publishing. Looking forward to an insightful discussion!