We are delighted to welcome DOAB/OAPEN as a member of the Open Book Collective!
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DOAB/OAPEN joins the Open Book Collective | OBC Information Hub
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Category Archives: oa.books
PALOMERA: the case for open access academic books – Research
“In January 2024, a new open access policy from UKRI for monographs, book chapters and edited collections comes into force. Jisc is supporting the implementation of this policy, and we feel that participation in the PALOMERA project will be of mutual benefit to Jisc and its members as we start to build up knowledge of the open access (OA) books policy landscape across the European Research Area (ERA). We hope that our experience of implementing an OA books strategy in the UK will be of use to our colleagues in Europe.
PALOMERA stands for Policy Alignment of Open Access Monographs in the European Research Area. The project has been funded for two years (2023-24) under the Horizon Europe: Reforming and enhancing the European R&I System with the aim of understanding why so few OA funder policies include books, and how this can be changed. It will:
Collect and analyse a wide variety of data source related to open access book publishing and funder policies across geographies, languages, economies, and disciplines within the ERA, creating a Knowledge Base that will structure and make available knowledge to explain the challenges and bottlenecks that hold back open access to academic books
Create a forum for funders to focus specifically on OA books and related issues
Produce actionable recommendations and resources to support funder and institutional policies for OA books, with the overall objective of speeding up the transition to open access for books to further promote open science
Address all relevant stakeholders (research funders and institutions, researchers, publishers, infrastructure providers, libraries, and national policymakers), facilitating co-creation and validation events throughout the project to ensure that the views and voices of all relevant stakeholders are represented…”
Book Bans Attack the LGBTQ+ Community, Open Access Is Part of Our Defense | punctum books
van Gerven Oei, V. W. J., & Joy, E. A. F. (2023). Book Bans Attack the LGBTQ+ Community, Open Access Is Part of Our Defense. Punctum Books. https://doi.org/10.21428/ae6a44a6.8634dbb0
Gli editori e le monografie scientifiche ad accesso aperto: un rapporto in evoluzione
A paper in Italian with this English-language abstract: The paper aims to propose the state of the art of Open Access scholarly monographs (OAB), a publishing product whose popularity has grown significantly in recent years. After reflection on the evolution of the relationship between publishers and OA, which has seen a gradual shift from initial mistrust to more convinced adherence, the paper examines some of the most significant innovations (policies, infrastructure, etc.) in OA publishing in recent years, focusing on the scholarly monographs publication. Based on these analyses, the paper proposes, in conclusion, some observations on current trends in this specific publishing field.
Visualizing the Impact of the University of Michigan Press Fund to Mission Initiative
“In the humanities, the monograph often acts as the lab where scholars experiment and engage with other thinkers. Despite the valuable ideas emerging from these fields, the academic community has struggled to find sustainable ways to make humanities monographs open access. Grant money and other funding is often less available to these scholars than to their counterparts in the sciences. As a result, the academic and publishing communities have had to explore new ways to make the turn to open. Fund-to-Mission from the University of Michigan Press is one such project to open the humanities….”
UKeiG 2023 Members’ Forum and Annual General Meeting
One session: “The impact of Open Access monographs and long form publications for researchers and the lay public-presented by David Ball.”
Another session: “Supporting not-for-profit journal publishing through library services and support presented by Sonya Betz.”
Beyond BPCs: Reimagining and re-infrastructuring the funding of Open Access books | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)
Deville, J. (2023). Beyond BPCs: Reimagining and re-infrastructuring the funding of Open Access books. Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.bd1b0402
If you have heard any of the Open Book Collective team talk about our work, perhaps in a meeting, perhaps in a talk, then it’s likely that at some point, the issue of ‘BPCs’ will have come up. BPCs, or Book Processing Charges, are to books what APCs (Article Processing Charges) are to journals. BPCs are levied — usually to a university or a funder, but also in principle potentially to the author — as a fee for making an academic book available on an Open Access basis. By Open Access I mean work that can be accessed online without barriers, published using an open license — typically, but not necessarily, a Creative Commons licence.
Within the academic publishing industry, BPCs remain the most common way to fund Open Access books. They are used by publishers small and large, and by not-for-profits and commercial publishers. For small/not-for profit publishers, BPCs are usually used to cover the core production costs associated with book publishing. For large commercial publishers, BPCs can sometimes also be used to offset some of the profit — for example, from books sales or licensing contracts — that is lost when a book is made openly available to all.
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Collective funding models for Open Access books – Jisc
“Join this online event to hear from publishers and libraries to discuss alternatives to the BPC model for open access book publishing.”
COPIM final conference “Scaling Small: Community-Owned Futures for Open Access Books”: Presentation slidedecks | Zenodo
Adema, Janneke, Barr, Peter, Bowie, Simon, Cole, Gareth, Deville, Joe, Fathallah, Judith, Grady, Tom, Grand, Philippa, Hall, Gary, McHardy, Julien, Kiesewetter, Rebekka, Mackay, Caroline, Moore, Samuel, Montgomery, Lucy, Ramalho, Amanda, & Tscheke, Nina. (2023, May 5). COPIM final conference “Scaling Small: Community-Owned Futures for Open Access Books”: Presentation slidedecks. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7898815
This deposit holds all slidedecks from presentations given during the two days of the final conference of the Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project, which was held on April 20 and 21, 2023, under the title of “Scaling Small: Community-Owned Futures for Open Access Books”.
Slidedecks & video recordings are also available via the conference website, at https://scalingsmall.pubpub.org/
Creating resilient publishing infrastructures | PubPub Community Spotlight
Adema, J., Deville, J., Steiner, T., & Gulliford (Kearns), S. (2023). Creating resilient publishing infrastructures. PubPub Help. Retrieved from https://help.pubpub.org/pub/n5lqcqb4
In this Spotlight interview, we chat with a few of the folks at COPIM — Janneke Adema, Joe Deville, and Tobias Steiner — about the many work packages and projects that have come out of their organization. This includes, but is not limited to, the Open Book Collective, Experimental Publishing Compendium, Thoth, and their latest project Open Book Futures. Given all these ideas and projects, we talk about what it means to adapt as an organization with shifting funding all the while “scaling small.”
Building Effective Outreach Strategies for Open Access Book Initiatives: Lessons Learned from the Open Book Collective | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)
Deville, J., Fathallah, J., & Onalee Snyder, L. (2023). Building Effective Outreach Strategies for Open Access Book Initiatives: Lessons Learned from the Open Book Collective . Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.c0d717bc
As Open Access (OA) book publishers, and especially Diamond Open Access publishers, increasingly turn towards membership programs to support their work, effective outreach has become ever more important. For such publishers and for us at the Open Book Collective (OBC) sustainability depends on successfully convincing supporters that our work, and in our case that of the publishers and infrastructure providers that are our members, is relevant to the libraries and other organizations that we are asking for ongoing financial support. In many cases, this also means speaking not just about individual publications, publishers, or publishing service providers, but issues connected to OA publishing more widely. For that reason, a key feature of our outreach has been stimulating conversation and engagement around the OBC, the platform, and the future of OA books.
In this blog post, we provide an account of how we have responded to the challenge of developing an effective outreach strategy, with the aim of sharing and archiving our experiences so that others may benefit from what we have learned, especially initiatives looking to engage with libraries and other institutional stakeholders. We document the development of the OBC’s outreach strategy and highlight the importance of effective outreach efforts in promoting wider access to scholarship.
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Frankl | Towards an Author-Centered Open Access Monograph Program: Understanding Open Access Cultures in Scholarly Publishing | The Journal of Electronic Publishing
Abstract: Author attitudes towards Open Access (OA) remains an important area of investigation in academic publishing. The successful implementation of new OA infrastructure and business models depend on their reception within scholarly communities. This paper proposes “Open Access Culture” — the set of beliefs, practices, and attitudes towards OA publishing shared by members of an academic field — as a framework to understand how OA innovations are and will be received by different scholarly communities. The investigation of OA culture helps identify the needs of individual academic fields (e.g., the importance of print publishing for a particular field), thus foregrounding author preferences in the publishing process. The University of Michigan Press (UMP) is drawing upon the OA Culture framework to aid the implementation of its OA monograph initiative. UMP has undertaken research (author survey as well as editor, author, and librarian interviews) to understand how the monograph initiative will integrate different fields. This paper presents results of this research demonstrating the application of the OA Culture framework to several fields, as well the Humanities, Arts, and Humanistic Social Sciences (HSS) more broadly. This is one way that University Presses may take an author-centered approach to OA publishing programs, one that foregrounds the needs of individual authors and considers their unique disciplinary context. Moreover, the paper offers a recent view of sentiments towards OA in the HSS and thus helps to contextualize the current OA landscape.
Diversity in the Stacks: The Open Access Pilot for Latin American Monographs | Penn Libraries
“This project provides universal free access to over 300 scholarly monographs published by the Latin American Council of Social Sciences….
In 2022, the Penn Libraries made a commitment to support open access publishing initiatives in Latin America by becoming a funding partner of the Latin American Research Resources Project Open Access Pilot for Latin American Monographs, already in its third year. This project provides universal free access to over 300 scholarly monographs published by the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales or CLACSO), a research institution with headquarters in Argentina. Contributing to this initiative represents Penn Libraries’ values in supporting the development of open access, global, and sustainable collections….”
Open Access of Humanities Monographs | NISO Humanities Roundtable | June 20, 2023
“This day-length conference continues in the tradition of the previous 20 years by drawing on the expertise of scholarly associations, university presses, librarians, researchers, and more to provide participants with exciting discussions around the needs of those working in the humanities. This year’s program will examine how the transition to open access and the emergence of new technologies will shape the future of these disciplines. In addition to thought-provoking keynotes and expert panels, the event will include plenty of time for interactivity and discussion, providing a forum for stakeholders to come together and identify trends, share best practices, and set priorities that reflect the needs of the humanities community….”
Palace Bookshelf Home
The OA books available from the Digital Public Library of America.