In the last years, the number of Open Access scientific journals is growing and challenging traditional paths of academic dissemination. This article presents a comparative analysis from Spain, the third country in Open Access journals in educational research, and highlights the impact that Hipatia Press, a non-profit Publisher, is having within this new scenario. A new line of scientific journals by Hipatia Press is making crucial steps in democratizing Spanish academia and scientific dissemination, not only by promoting Open Access and Open Source tools, but also by means of contributing to change traditional structures in the academia. Hipatia Press journals open peer review processes and authorship to international scholars, and share the common principle of validity claims questioning cronyism in citation dynamics and research dissemination.

The objectives of this article are two-fold. First, it analyzes the emergence and presence of Open Access [OA] and Open Source scientific journals in the field of educational research with a particular focus on Spain, the third largest country in OA journals after Brazil and the United States. Second, the paper describes the contributions within that context that Hipatia Press cooperative is making to the field by embracing Open Access ethics in a new series of high-quality scientific journals with a high presence of international scholars among their authors and peer reviewers. This analysis of the origins and success of the Hipatia Press project also sheds light on its on-going contributions at the international level and its future.

Hipatia Press was founded in Barcelona in 2007 on the ground of quite different principles; with the intellectual aim of disseminating scientific books based on their quality rather than on commercial objectives. In 2011, within the context mentioned above, Hipatia Press launched its Scientific Journals with the aim of disseminating high-quality international and interdisciplinary research and do so following transparent criteria of scientific quality, contributing to the advancement of science and the improvement of societies.  Hipatia Press counts with the publication of ten journals from a wide range of disciplinary and multidisciplinary fields in educational and social sciences.

The case of Hipatia Press scientific journals is of particular significance. Hipatia Press editors are mostly junior scholars proposed accordingly to their early career scientific achievements, and they are in charge of implementing and ensuring Hipatia Press high-quality principles during the entire publication process. Also, Hipatia Press journals neither are part of a university publishing group, nor of any academic department or Library. Hipatia Press is a non-profit organization with some of the characteristics that Willinsky (2006) attributes to the Open Access Cooperative model. Yet Hipatia Press has other unique features. It is a non-profit organization committed to the advancement of science, with very diverse scholars and collaborators who contribute their time in editing, layout, proofreading, peer review follow-up and others aspects related to the microeconomics of OA journals.