Category Archives: oa.punctum

£5.8 million funding to significantly expand and accelerate COPIM open access infrastructures | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

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The Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs project (COPIM) is delighted that Arcadia and the Research England Development (RED) Fund are supporting a new initiative that will build on the pioneering work of the COPIM project.

The Open Book Futures project (OBF), led by Lancaster University, will significantly expand key infrastructures created by COPIM to achieve a step change in how community-owned Open Access (OA) book publishing is delivered.

Open Book Futures will follow the principles of ‘Scaling Small’ that guided the work of the COPIM project, further developing the infrastructures, business models, networks and resources that are needed to deliver a future for Open Access books led not by large commercial operations, but by communities of scholars, small-to-medium-sized publishers, not-for-profit infrastructure providers, and scholarly libraries.

Among its activities, OBF will deepen and accelerate the work of:

the recently launched Open Book Collective, which makes it easier for academic libraries to provide direct financial support to small- and medium-sized OA publishing initiatives;

the Thoth metadata management and dissemination platform;

the Opening the Future revenue model;

the forthcoming Experimental Publishing Compendium; 

the forthcoming Thoth Archiving Network.

Open Book Futures, which will run from 1 May 2023 to 30 April 2026, will increase COPIM’s long-term impact and ensure that a wide range of voices have the opportunity to shape the future of open access book publishing. In order to amplify bibliodiverse and equitable community-led approaches to OA book publishing, OBF aims not just to strengthen existing networks in the UK and North America, but also to engage further with publishers, universities, and infrastructure providers in a diverse set of national and linguistic contexts, including Africa, Australasia, Continental Europe, and Latin America.

With that in mind, OBF will reunite many of the COPIM project partners, including Birkbeck, University of London, Coventry University, Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), Jisc, Loughborough University, Open Book Collective (OBC), Open Book Publishers (OBP), punctum books, Thoth, and Trinity College, Cambridge University, and they will also be joined by a wide range of new partners including Continental Platform/University of Cape Town, the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI), the Digital Preservation Coalition, the Educopia Institute, Knowledge Futures, Lyrasis, OPERAS, Public Knowledge Project (PKP), Research Libraries UK (RLUK), SciELO Books, Scottish Universities Press/SCURL, and SPARC Europe. The project is also supported by Lancaster University Library.

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£5.8 million project to deliver a more sustainable future for Open Access books | Lancaster University

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A new project that works to increase access to valuable research is to receive more than £5.8 million in funding.

Led by Lancaster University, the Open Book Futures (OBF) project will develop and support organisations, tools and practices that enable both academics and the wider public to make more and better use of books published on an Open Access basis. Open Access books can be accessed and used online free of charge.

In particular, the project, which is also supported by Lancaster University Library, aims to achieve a step change in how community-owned Open Access book publishing is delivered.

Funded by Arcadia and the Research England Development (RED) Fund, the project marks a shift in the ambition, scope and impact of community-owned Open Access book publishing.

It will significantly increase and improve the quantity, discoverability, preservation and accessibility of academic content freely and easily available to all.

This will be done by building the infrastructures, business models, networks and resources that are needed to deliver a future for Open Access books led not by large commercial operations but by communities of scholars, small-to-medium-sized publishers, not-for-profit infrastructure providers, and scholarly libraries.

This includes expanding the work of the recently launched Open Book Collective, which makes it easier for academic libraries to provide direct financial support to Open Access publishing initiatives, as well as the Thoth metadata management platform, the Opening the Future revenue model and the forthcoming Experimental Publishing Compendium.

Open Book Futures, due to start on May 1st, builds on the pioneering work of the Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project. COPIM, a strategic international partnership led by Coventry University, began the work of establishing the key open, community-led solutions required to address the barriers to the wider impact of Open Access books.

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VCU Libraries supports independent, queer, peer-reviewed open access publisher punctum books

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“VCU Libraries has joined the Supporting Library Membership Program of the open access book publisher punctum books–an independent queer- and scholar-led, and peer-reviewed open access book publisher. 

punctum books is devoted to authors working in the humanities, social sciences, fine arts and architecture and design who want to publish books that are genre-queer and genre-bending and which take experimental risks with the forms and styles of intellectual writing. All works published by punctum are licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License, making them available without cost and without barriers to their reuse….”

Download Thoth Metadata Records Directly from the punctum Website · punctum books

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n another important step in the development of metadata management system Thoth, created in the context of the COPIM project, we are now able to generate full ONIX 3.0 and CSV metadata records of punctum books’s catalog.

Thanks to the development of a new Metadata Export API by Javier Arias and Ross Higman, we now have stable URLs that will allow any reader or supporting library to access punctum books’s CC0-licensed metadata. Currently the only two available formats are ONIX 3.0 and CSV, but in the coming months we also hope to add MARCXML, KBART, and several other formats. You can read more about our prioritorization of metadata formats in the COPIM blogpost from February.

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Open Position: Libraries Outreach Associate · punctum books

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“punctum books is looking for a Libraries Outreach Associate to the join the team, for a period of 17 months, working full time. The successful applicant will assist with punctum’s work on the Community-led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project, funded by Research England and the Arcadia Fund and led by the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University, in collaboration with several world-class universities. The project addresses the key technological, structural, and organisational hurdles—around funding, production, dissemination, discovery, reuse, and archiving—that are standing in the way of the wider adoption and impact of open-access (OA) books (see the project website for more information: https://www.copim.ac.uk/)….”

Punctum Books Library Program Partners with Lyrasis for the US & Canada · punctum books

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“As the Punctum Books Supporting Library Membership Program, launched in collaboration with the University of California Santa Barbara as a network of collective support for open access book publishing, has entered its second year, we are proud to announce that punctum books has partnered with LYRASIS to broaden our reach among US and Canadian academic libraries.

LYRASIS, a not-for-profit membership organization of more than 1,000 libraries, museums, and archives supports enduring access to our shared academic, scientific, and cultural heritage through leadership in open technologies, content services, digital solutions, and collaboration with archives, libraries, museums, and knowledge communities worldwide.

Our partnership with LYRASIS will complement our partnership with Jisc in the UK, which already has seen several UK-based academic libraries sign up to support punctum in its mission to publish open-access books that push the boundaries of scholarship….”

Fair OA publishers, infrastructures and initiatives supported by KU Leuven | KU Leuven Open Science

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KU Leuven promotes non-commercial and community-owned approaches of OA, especially through the KU Leuven Fund for Fair OA. On the one hand, the fund supports innovative publishing initiatives and infrastructures. On the other hand, the fund covers membership costs for consortia and advocacy organizations focusing on a non-commercial approach to scholarly communication. On this page you can find an overview of everything that KU Leuven endorses.

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Why CC BY-NC Licenses Are Still Necessary in Open Access Book Publishing · punctum books

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“On February 13, UK Research and Innovation released their Open Access Review: Consultation, outlining a proposed Open Access policy for the UK’s research councils, which are in charge of funding scholarly research.

As already remarked by Lucy Barnes of Open Book Publishers, the UKRI review explicitly rejects CC BY-NC (Attribution–NonCommercial) licenses as compliant with its definition of Open Access, including for monographs, book chapters, and edited collections….

The rationale behind these clauses excluding CC BY-NC from the definition of “true” Open Access is that the content of open access publications never should be constrained by the prohibition on commercial use. For example, it may be imagined that usage of scholarship from a medical paper that could contribute to a commercial application that saves thousands of lives would be prohibited by a CC BY-NC license. This would of course not be desirable (even though it remains a question whether it’s ethical to capitalize on publicly funded research to the extent the current pharmaceutical complex is doing)….

The reasons why punctum books is arguing for the inclusion of the possibility of CC BY-NC licenses for scholarly monographs (and therefore against the limitations set by both the UKRI and Plan-S) is not because we would reject commercial reuse of the content of the books we publish. We reject the monetization of the Open Access books as material object, whether its carrier is paper or silicon….”

Here’s What You Can Do with Your Overhead · punctum books

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“As punctum books over the last few years has tried to develop a sustainable model of scholar-led open-access publishing, and has devoted a considerable amount of resources to advocating for the common goods of public scholarship and knowledge, we have increasingly encountered arguments, both open and veiled, that somehow our practice would not be “replicable,” “scalable,” or, indeed, “sustainable.” These arguments often depart from the assumption that we—in one way or the other—are not playing by the rules of the academic publishing game. And because we would be rigging the game, our publishing model could reasonably never gain any traction, let alone serve as a model for others.

Some of these arguments suggest that we have poured our own supposed personal (or family) resources into punctum, and that this would give us an unfair advantage over traditional legacy publishers. If we choose to disregard the reality of the sizable endowments for certain university presses and the obscene profit margins of commercial players, it is indeed the case that for many years we have worked for salaries below the industry standard. However, we never made the claim that the scholar-led open-access model that punctum advocates necessitates such below-market remuneration levels; on the contrary, we believe that with the current money that is already in the system, all scholarly publishers, editors, and authors can be paid a reasonable living wage. We don’t assume that any open-access scholar-led publishing house that were to follow the model we are developing would have to make the same financial sacrifices we did in our early years—that, indeed, would be unsustainable and unreplicable….”

Here’s What You Can Do with Your Overhead · punctum books

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“As punctum books over the last few years has tried to develop a sustainable model of scholar-led open-access publishing, and has devoted a considerable amount of resources to advocating for the common goods of public scholarship and knowledge, we have increasingly encountered arguments, both open and veiled, that somehow our practice would not be “replicable,” “scalable,” or, indeed, “sustainable.” These arguments often depart from the assumption that we—in one way or the other—are not playing by the rules of the academic publishing game. And because we would be rigging the game, our publishing model could reasonably never gain any traction, let alone serve as a model for others.

Some of these arguments suggest that we have poured our own supposed personal (or family) resources into punctum, and that this would give us an unfair advantage over traditional legacy publishers. If we choose to disregard the reality of the sizable endowments for certain university presses and the obscene profit margins of commercial players, it is indeed the case that for many years we have worked for salaries below the industry standard. However, we never made the claim that the scholar-led open-access model that punctum advocates necessitates such below-market remuneration levels; on the contrary, we believe that with the current money that is already in the system, all scholarly publishers, editors, and authors can be paid a reasonable living wage. We don’t assume that any open-access scholar-led publishing house that were to follow the model we are developing would have to make the same financial sacrifices we did in our early years—that, indeed, would be unsustainable and unreplicable….”

Transitioning punctum books to Open Source Infrastructure · punctum books

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“Without open source digital infrastructure, open access publishing has no long-term chance of truly remaining open, that is, not only free to read but also free to write, free to edit, and free to publish. Without a commitment to make, as much as possible, the entire book production pipeline open, the decision of who gets to write and who gets to read will always remain beholden to actors that do not consider the public good their first priority.

An overarching profit motive of any of the vendors that punctum books uses as part of its pipeline posits a risk for our open access ideal: we are as weak as our most commercial link. Furthermore, the implementation of GDPR in the European Union obliges us to be much more careful with what happens with the personal data of our authors and readers – and rightfully so. Like knowledge, privacy is a public good that is at odds with the idea of profit maximalization. The open source community, on the contrary, embraces the public sharing of knowledge while safeguarding the human right to privacy.

Our first step was to find a replacement of the technically most complicated part of the book production process, the book design itself. This brought us to the good folks of Editoria, who are very close to cracking the nut of creating an open source online collaborative environment for the editing of scholarly texts combined with an output engine that creates well designed EPUB, HTML, PDF, and ICML output formats.

Through the COPIM project of Scholarled, punctum books was also already involved in the development of a metadata database and management system (under the codenames Thoth and Hapi) that will be the first free and open source system to generate ONIX, MARC, and KBART records….”

Transitioning punctum books to Open Source Infrastructure · punctum books

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“Without open source digital infrastructure, open access publishing has no long-term chance of truly remaining open, that is, not only free to read but also free to write, free to edit, and free to publish. Without a commitment to make, as much as possible, the entire book production pipeline open, the decision of who gets to write and who gets to read will always remain beholden to actors that do not consider the public good their first priority.

An overarching profit motive of any of the vendors that punctum books uses as part of its pipeline posits a risk for our open access ideal: we are as weak as our most commercial link. Furthermore, the implementation of GDPR in the European Union obliges us to be much more careful with what happens with the personal data of our authors and readers – and rightfully so. Like knowledge, privacy is a public good that is at odds with the idea of profit maximalization. The open source community, on the contrary, embraces the public sharing of knowledge while safeguarding the human right to privacy.

Our first step was to find a replacement of the technically most complicated part of the book production process, the book design itself. This brought us to the good folks of Editoria, who are very close to cracking the nut of creating an open source online collaborative environment for the editing of scholarly texts combined with an output engine that creates well designed EPUB, HTML, PDF, and ICML output formats.

Through the COPIM project of Scholarled, punctum books was also already involved in the development of a metadata database and management system (under the codenames Thoth and Hapi) that will be the first free and open source system to generate ONIX, MARC, and KBART records….”

Lester Spence…argues that African-Americans have bought into the wrong politics

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“To make such alternatives [to neoliberalism] visible is why Spence decided to place Hustle [his new book] with the open-access publisher Punctum. A print copy can be bought through Punctum’s website, but the publisher is also making a digital version available free of charge six months after release. If Spence is going to advocate knocking the hustle, he might as well do it himself. If he’s writing a book that argues against being one of the many entrepreneurial hustlers just looking to get paid, then he better not put an economic barrier in front of somebody wanting to access that idea….”