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
Fradenburg Joy, E. A. & van Gerven Oei, V. W., (2023) “What is Your Threshold? The Economics of Open Access Scholarly Book Publishing, the “Business” of Care, and the Case of punctum books”, The Journal of Electronic Publishing 26(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.3627
“Open Book Futures (OBF) is a new project working to increase access to valuable research through developing and supporting organisations, tools and practices that will enable both academics and the wider public to make more and better use of books published on an Open Access basis. In particular, the project 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, piloted with Central European University Press and Liverpool University Press; and the forthcoming Experimental Publishing Compendium….”
“The Action Plan for Diamond Open Access outlines a set of priorities to develop sustainable, community-driven, academic-led and -owned scholarly communication. Its goal is to create a global federation of Diamond Open Access (Diamond OA) journals and platforms around shared principles, guidelines, and quality standards while respecting their cultural, multilingual and disciplinary diversity. It proposes a definition of Diamond OA as a scholarly publication model in which journals and platforms do not charge fees to either authors or readers. Diamond OA is community-driven, academic-led and -owned, and serves a wide variety of generally small-scale, multilingual, and multicultural scholarly communities.
Still, Diamond OA is often seen as a mere business model for scholarly publishing: no fees for authors or readers. However, Diamond OA can be better characterized by a shared set of values and principles that go well beyond the business aspect. These distinguish Diamond OA communities from other approaches to scholarly publishing. It is therefore worthwhile to spell out these values and principles, so they may serve as elements of identification for Diamond OA communities.
The principles formulated below are intended as a first draft. They are not cast in stone, and meant to inspire discussion and evolve as a living document that will crystallize over the coming months. Many of these principles are not exclusive to Diamond OA communities. Some are borrowed or adapted from the more general 2019 Good Practice Principles for scholarly communication services defined by Sparc and COAR1, or go back to the 2016 Vienna Principles. Others have been carefully worked out in more detail by the FOREST Framework for Values-Driven Scholarly Communication in a self-assessment format for scholarly communities. Additional references can be added in the discussion.
The formulation of these principles has benefited from many conversations over the years with various members of the Diamond community now working together in the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access, cOAlition S, the CRAFT-OA and DIAMAS projects, the Fair Open Access Alliance (FOAA), Linguistics in Open Access (LingOA), the Open Library of Humanities, OPERAS, SciELO, Science Europe, and Redalyc-Amelica. This document attempts to embed these valuable contributions into principles defining the ethos of Diamond OA publishing….”
“We are pleased to announce our participation in the recently launched Open Book Futures (OBF) project, funded by Arcadia and the Research England Development (RED) Fund.
Open Access (OA) publishing has transformed how scholars and the wider public access academic content. However, despite the many benefits of OA, the number of OA books published each year is still relatively low compared to OA journal articles. In response to this challenge, the OBF project was launched with the intention of significantly increasing and improving the quantity, discoverability, and accessibility of academic content, ensuring it is freely and easily available to not only scholars but also the general public. The intention is to build on the pioneering work conducted within the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project….”
From Google’s English: “In these twenty years, Open Access has established itself as a topic from the edge of the progressive to the ubiquitous form of publication and thus also to an institutionalized field of work in libraries, scientific institutions, research sponsors and scientific publishers as well as research policy. Today we are at a point where national and federal open access strategies have been enacted, policies of sponsors and universities prescribe the publication of texts and research data according to the FAIR and CARE principles and read-and-publish agreements at national level level have become the norm. Resources were mobilized and infrastructure built – from repositories to open access transformation contracts for, among other things, access to large journal portfolios, to human resources and systems, to check compliance with Open Access requirements of scientific organizations and sponsors as well as compliance with contractual clauses. To a certain extent, and still with untapped potential, open access has become the norm in the scientific community. A normal case that costs hundreds of millions of euros and francs a year in the DACH region alone – for licenses, for personnel hours, for hardware and software. It has become an industry – one that can polemically be called “Big OA”. which costs hundreds of millions of euros and francs every year in the DACH region alone – for licenses, for staff hours, for hardware and software. It has become an industry – one that can polemically be called “Big OA”. which costs hundreds of millions of euros and francs a year in the DACH region alone – for licenses, for staff hours, for hardware and software. It has become an industry – one that can polemically be called “Big OA”.
Looking back at the Berlin Declaration and the atmosphere in which this and other declarations were written, doubts quickly arise. Is this really what Open Access should be? …
What interests us in issue #44 are these counter-movements in the area of ??Open Access. Not Big OA, but the opposite – small OA or, as we like to call it, Grassroots OA . Models that researchers themselves or libraries and other memory institutions might want to use to openly publish knowledge and data rather than discuss them. Projects that are not aimed at large profit margins, but idealistically at the dissemination and ordering of information and knowledge. Applications that may also run under the hand of the established models and therefore practically no longer appear in libraries – whose work structures are more and more oriented towards functioning within the framework of “Big OA”. …”
Introduction
The Action Plan for Diamond Open Access outlines a set of priorities to develop sustainable, community-driven, academic-led and -owned scholarly communication. Its goal is to create a global federation of Diamond Open Access (Diamond OA) journals and platforms around shared principles, guidelines, and quality standards while respecting their cultural, multilingual and disciplinary diversity. It proposes a definition of Diamond OA as a scholarly publication model in which journals and platforms do not charge fees to either authors or readers. Diamond OA is community-driven, academic-led and -owned, and serves a wide variety of generally small-scale, multilingual, and multicultural scholarly communities.
Still, Diamond OA is often seen as a mere business model for scholarly publishing: no fees for authors or readers. However, Diamond OA can be better characterized by a shared set of values and principles that go well beyond the business aspect. These distinguish Diamond OA communities from other approaches to scholarly publishing. It is therefore worthwhile to spell out these values and principles, so they may serve as elements of identification for Diamond OA communities.
The principles formulated below are intended as a first draft. They are not cast in stone, and meant to inspire discussion and evolve as a living document that will crystallize over the coming months. Many of these principles are not exclusive to Diamond OA communities. Some are borrowed or adapted from the more general 2019 Good Practice Principles for scholarly communication services defined by Sparc and COAR1, or go back to the 2016 Vienna Principles. Others have been carefully worked out in more detail by the FOREST Framework for Values-Driven Scholarly Communication in a self-assessment format for scholarly communities. Additional references can be added in the discussion.
The formulation of these principles has benefited from many conversations over the years with various members of the Diamond community now working together in the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access, cOAlition S, the CRAFT-OA and DIAMAS projects, the Fair Open Access Alliance (FOAA), Linguistics in Open Access (LingOA), the Open Library of Humanities, OPERAS, SciELO, Science Europe, and Redalyc-Amelica. This document attempts to embed these valuable contributions into principles defining the ethos of Diamond OA publishing.
The Open Book Collective is delighted to welcome Amherst College Libraries as a supporting library member!
Text of a talk given to the COPIM end-of-project conference: “Scaling Small: Community-Owned Futures for Open Access Books”, April 20th 2023.
Open access publishing has always had a difficult relationship with smoothness and scale. Openness implies seamlessness, limitlessness or structureless-ness – or the idea that the removal of price and permission barriers is what’s needed to allow research to reach its full potential. The drive for seamlessness is on display in much of the push for interoperability of standards and persistent identifiers that shape the infrastructures of openness. Throughout the evolution of open access, many ideas have been propagated around, for example, the necessity of CC BY as the one and only licence that facilitates this interoperability and smoothness of access and possible reuse. Similarly, failed projects such as One Repo sought to create a single open access repository to rule them all, in response to the perceived messy and stratified institutional and subject repository landscape.
Yet this relationship between openness and scale also leads to new kinds of closure, particularly the commercial closures of walled gardens that stretch across proprietary services and make researcher data available for increasing user surveillance. The economies of scale of commercial publishers require cookie-cutter production processes that remove all traces of care from publishing, in exchange for APCs and BPCs, thus ensuring that more publications can be processed cheaply with as little recourse to paid human labour as possible. Smoothness and scale are simply market enclosures by another name.
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Please vote to support this request to add the collection of Diamond OA publications in Thoth (http://www.thoth.pub/) as a Community Zone collection.
Thoth contains a steadily growing collection of OA publications from scholar-led publishers such as punctum books, Open Book Publishers, meson press, mediastudies.press, and African Minds, and we have been working with UC Santa Barbara Library to make it more accessible to libraries worldwide.
Creating a dedicated Community Zone would substantially increase access to these OA publishers.
We are pleased to announce the release of the final report from COPIM’s Governance Work Package (WP4), titled Governing Scholar-Led OA Book Publishers: Values, Practices, Barriers. This report develops some of the issues we have previously explored within COPIM with regard to community governance, such as the challenges of governing a collective and the relationship of governance to common resources, to explore how these apply in practice to the publication of books by small-to-medium Open Access publishers, as well as what barriers they have faced in implementing their governance models. It presents and discusses the results of six interviews with small and medium Open Access publishers from the ScholarLed consortium. It then offers some recommendations and insights into how other small and medium Open Access publishers might set up and/or improve their governance practices, including how the Open Book Collective and Open Book Futures project might support them in doing so.
Governing Scholar-Led OA Book Publishers was written by Dr. Judith Fathallah, with the kind assistance of the following interviewees:
François van Schalkwyk, Director of African Minds
Joe Deville, Co-Founder of Mattering Press
Jeff Pooley, Director of mediastudies.press
Mercedes Bunz, Co-Founder of meson press
Alessandra Tosi, Co-Director of Open Book Publishers
Eileen Joy, Co-Director of punctum books.
After a contextual discussion on the need for scholar-led OA publishers and governance issues related to the concept of the knowledge commons, the report presents the interview data. The publishers discuss the impetuses to startup their presses; incorporation and its forms; the elements, resources and actors in their governance structures; the evolution of governance structures and processes; their current mechanisms and procedures;t ransparency and self assessment; their relationships with institutions and organizations; and their perspectives on current governance.
Some reccomendations are then made to assist new publishers in considering their governance, and links to tools and resources provided.
The report has been published as a living document on COPIM’s Open Documentation Site (PubPub), and is also availabe as a time-stamped PDF version on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7801216.
“We’re really excited to share information about a new association that will support open access publishing activities at UK universities. The Open Institutional Publishing Association will launch over the summer in 2023, and will be a supportive community of practice for OA publishing….
There has been a growing focus at UK universities on the discussion about OA publishing, what it means, and how universities can support this. In practice, this has meant an increase in open access publishing activity at the institutions themselves. Some of this is formalised, as seen in the increasing number of new university presses over the last 5 years or so. Some of it is less formal, such as providing in-house infrastructure for journals to use, or using repository tools to support publication. This range of publishing activity shows the different ways UK universities are looking to support the move to OA, all as important and relevant as each other….”
“Across countries in the global north the transition to open access to research has in recent years been driven largely through library consortia and national institutions striking transformative agreements with commercial publishers. Drawing on recent work on The University of Sheffield’s content strategy, Peter Barr argues that academic libraries can play a larger role in fostering community owned scholarly publishing….
Despite the fact that institutions and funders ultimately provide the money and set the culture within which research is conducted, they have devolved the practicalities of the transition to open research to academic libraries. The assumption being that libraries can leverage their long-standing relationships with academic publishers to negotiate ‘Transformative’ agreements that ensure research is published open access, but these relationships are dysfunctional. In reality, what libraries have proved is that they are skilled at finding the funds to pay for ever escalating ransom notes, more than they are successful in building equitable partnerships with publishers….”
“Our previous blogpost about computational publishing outlined the technical model that we are using to create computational books that combine text with Python code to pull in datasets and digital media objects. This blogpost discusses a particular use case for this computational publishing model and how we have designed a working prototype of a publishers’ catalogue for ScholarLed.
ScholarLed is a publishing consortium of scholar-led open access book presses and has been a key partner in the COPIM project. During COPIM’s computational publishing pilot project, we have worked closely with ScholarLed (and Open Book Publishers in particular) to get the perspective of a publishing press and to ensure that our outputs can be fit into a traditional publishing workflow.
As a consortium of six open access presses, ScholarLed had a use case for a publishers’ catalogue that would present all their recent book publications in one catalogue. This would involve collecting bibliographic metadata from all of the presses, collating and arranging it, and then publishing the list of published books in a single publication. Fortunately all the presses have included the metadata for their monograph publications in Thoth, the open metadata management and dissemination platform that has been produced as another COPIM output. This made it possible to easily conceive of a catalogue published as both a website and a PDF that pulls in and arranges the bibliographic metadata automatically and that can be updated on a regular basis without manual intervention….”
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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