Passionate about open access publication, we started Nix Publishing Services as a wild idea in 2020; our ultimate goal was the promotion of free, immediate, and online availability of research articles. Back then, the concept of open access was not well received by researchers; “Why would you do that? Don’t you have access to the papers via your university?”. And yet, not everybody was affiliated with a university and was granted access to publications: sometimes if you are on your own, your only options are to either beg colleagues (not sustainable) or download illegally (not ethical). No one can afford to buy all the papers they need for their research.

For whatever reason, in the early days, open access was synonymous with low quality and/or self publishing. It took a long time to change that state of mind: damn predatory publishers didn’t help. Because of these avaricious ‘companies’, we couldn’t advertise our services without seeming to fall in that category. Sending an email to a small conference and letting them know that we could help disseminate their research portrayed us as a predator, only been interested in their money. As such, our not-for-profit organisation was quiet for a while…

Speaking of money, publishing is not free, never has been. Researchers were oblivious when accessing research via their university portal page. “Why would you pay to get published, when it’s free with these big publishers? And I can access the papers anyway, so why bother with open access?”. Asking for a small fee to simply cover manual labour (such as proofreading) was not always well received. Even while endlessly working for the good health of our organisation without financial compensation, we still had bills to pay, yet people would still ask us: “Why would you do that, working for so little?”. Well the answer is simple, we believe in open access, always have, and we wanted to contribute to a better world.

The turning point for us came when we started publishing the EUROCALL short papers and started being exhibitors at conferences in our language learning community to explain why research should be published in open access. We offered to publish book projects at very affordable prices so that money wasn’t a barrier, all the while maintaining super high quality content (of which we are very proud). We know how important it is to have papers recognised by peers and colleagues, we’re researchers too! It was at this time researchers started listening to the benefits of open access.

We had such a great journey convincing researchers in our community of the value of open access for their research, such a great experience bringing to life more than 60 books (61 to be precise), and are grateful to have collaborated with so many researchers.

Given the current and global trends in open access, we are extremely proud of the tiny part we played in this gigantic scene and feel our aim has come to an end with the general availability of open access publications. As a natural and logical consequence, we are winding down our operation and will be closing our not-for-profit organisation in January 2023.

Saying this, we would like to point out that all our publications will be preserved. In other words, we can ensure that all published research will still be there, even if we are not