Category Archives: oa.educopia

£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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A Cohort-Based Pilot of the FOREST Framework for Values-Driven Scholarly Communication | Educopia Institute

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“The FOREST Framework for Values-Driven Scholarly Communication helps scholarly communication organizations and communities demonstrate, evaluate, and ultimately improve their alignment with key values, including: Financial and Organizational Sustainability; Openness and Interoperability; Representative Governance; Equity, Accessibility, and Anti-Oppression; Sharing of Knowledge; and Transparency.

 

It does so by defining concrete evaluation mechanisms that communities can use to assess how their policies and practices align with these values. It prompts communities to consider the values they hold and how they demonstrate and communicate their commitment to these values. It provides guidance on actions they can take to manifest their values more effectively, and it encourages communities to see themselves as part of an interconnected system (or commons) in which their actions and decisions directly affect other participants.

This summer, the NGLP project brought together a cohort of scholarly communications communities, including for- and non-profit service and technology providers and library publishers, to pilot the FOREST Framework. …”

Wrapping up the Library Publishing Workflows Project | Educopia

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Over the past three years, Library Publishing Workflows—an IMLS-funded (LG-36-19-0133-19) project of Educopia Institute, the Library Publishing Coalition, and twelve partner libraries—has been fostering conversation about the workflows library publishers use to publish journals, how libraries have developed their journal publishing services, and the major challenges they face in their day-to-day work. We have also released a wide range of materials—from workflows to documentation tools to reflections—to support library publishers in their work. As the project winds down, we wanted to provide a round-up of all of the major project outputs.

Building Data Resilience Through Collaborative Networks | Educopia Institute

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“The aim of this symposium is to share information and best practices on the opportunities, challenges, models, methodologies, successes, and collaborative strategies concerning data sharing for digital scholarship, science, and community formation more broadly. The broad audience addressed will include faculty, librarians, technologists, and university administrators interested in these topics….”

Seeding a Community of FORESTers | Educopia Institute

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“How well do your policies and practices align with your values? And how well do your vendors’ and partners’ policies and practices align with your values?

Do you know? Would it change your investment choices if you did? 

We believe that if there were clearer ways to evidence and assess actions against values, it could.

The Next Generation Library Publishing (NGLP) team is excited to announce the release of the FOREST Framework for Values-Driven Scholarly Communication. This framework has been created to help scholarly communication organizations and communities to demonstrate, evaluate, and improve their alignment over time with six key values:  

Financial and Organizational Sustainability

Openness

Representative Governance

Equity, Accessibility, and Anti-Oppression

Sharing of Knowledge

Transparency …”

Harmon | ETDplus Toolkit [Tool Review] | Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication

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Abstract:  Electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) have traditionally taken the form of PDFs and ETD programs and their submission and curation procedures have been built around this format. However, graduate students are increasingly creating non-PDF files during their research, and in some cases these files are just as or more important than the PDFs that must be submitted to satisfy degree requirements. As a result, both graduate students and ETD administrators need training and resources to support the handling of a wide variety of complex digital objects. The Educopia Institute’s ETDplus Toolkit provides a highly usable set of modules to address this need, openly licensed to allow for reuse and adaption to a variety of potential use cases.

 

Living Our Values and Principles: Annotated Bibliography | Educopia Institute

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Community-based values and principles sit at the core of the Next Generation Library Publishing (NGLP) project, and members of our team have done extensive work over the past year researching and synthesizing the values and principles identified by individuals, organizations, and coalitions throughout the open knowledge community. In the course of developing the project and creating resources such as the draft Values and Principles Framework & Assessment Checklist and Living Our Values and Principles: Exploring Assessment Strategies for the Scholarly Communication Field, we found and reviewed dozens of values and principles statements, manifestos, articles, and book chapters spanning the worlds of scholarly communications, open data, open science, and open source software. 

In addition to informing our work on the project, we think the annotated bibliography that we’ve built along the way might be of use to others on similar journeys. To enable others to dig deeply into the articles and values statements contained within this annotated bibliography now and in the future, we are releasing it now as a formal publication. We will continue to add to this resource through the end of the NGLP project in August, 2022. If you find an article or values statement that you think would benefit this project, please reach out to Brandon Locke (brandon@educopia.org) to suggest its inclusion.

ETDplus Toolkit [Tool Review]

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Abstract:  Electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) have traditionally taken the form of PDFs and ETD programs and their submission and curation procedures have been built around this format. However, graduate students are increasingly creating non-PDF files during their research, and in some cases these files are just as or more important than the PDFs that must be submitted to satisfy degree requirements. As a result, both graduate students and ETD administrators need training and resources to support the handling of a wide variety of complex digital objects. The Educopia Institute’s ETDplus Toolkit provides a highly usable set of modules to address this need, openly licensed to allow for reuse and adaption to a variety of potential use cases.

 

Educopia awarded $245,000 from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the Cita Press project | Educopia Institute

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“Educopia Institute is excited to announce an award in the amount of $245,000 from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in support of the Cita Press: Getting Fit project. 

Through this project, Educopia will partner with Cita Press Founder and Art Director, Juliana Castro, to build organizational capacity and a sustainability roadmap for Cita Press (citapress.org). In direct alignment with the objectives of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Public Knowledge Program, Cita Press celebrates the spread of culture and knowledge by publishing the writings of female authors whose works are open-licensed or in the public domain. Through its library of collaboratively designed free books, Cita honors the principles of decentralization, collective knowledge production, and equitable access to knowledge….”

SComCaT: Scholarly Communication Technology Catalogue

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This catalogue has been developed by Antleaf for the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) as part of the Next Generation Libraries Publishing project and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License

SComCat comprises a catalogue (knowledge base) of scholarly communication open technologies where the term “technologies” is defined to include software and some essential running services. The aim is to assist potential users in making decisions about which technologies they will adopt by providing an overview of the functionality, organizational models, dependencies, use of standards, and levels of adoption of each technology.

The scan includes tools, platforms, and standards that can be locally adopted to support one or more of functions of the lifecycle of scholarly communication, which is conceptualized as including the following activities: creation, evaluation, publication, dissemination, preservation, and reuse.

We envision this scan as being extensible over time in order to address the evolving needs of various communities.

SComCat is built as open-source software, licensed under an MIT License.

Living Our Values and Principles: Exploring Assessment Strategies for the Scholarly Communication Field | Educopia Institute

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“Through the Next Generation Library Publishing project (2019-2022), Educopia Institute, California Digital Library, and Stratos, in close collaboration with COAR, LYRASIS, and Longleaf Services, seek to improve the publishing pathways and choices available to authors, editors, and readers through strengthening, integrating, and scaling up scholarly publishing infrastructures to support library publishers. In addition to building publishing tools and workflows, our team is exploring how to create community hosting models that align explicitly and demonstratively with academic values. 

Living Our Values and Principles: Exploring Assessment Strategies for the Scholarly Communication Field explores the relationship between today’s varied scholarly publishing service providers and the academic values that we believe should guide their work. We begin with a brief definition of the academic mission and then briefly probe how profit motivations have come to dominate the current scholarly publishing marketplace. We consider and analyze how academic players from a range of stakeholder backgrounds have produced a broad range of “values and principles” statements, documents, and manifestos in hopes of recalibrating the scholarly publishing landscape. We contextualize this work within the broader landscape of assessment against values and principles.

Based on our findings, we recommend that academic stakeholders more concretely define their values and principles in terms of measurable actions, so these statements can be readily assessed and audited. We propose a methodology for auditing publishing service providers to ensure adherence to agreed-upon academic values and principles, with the dual goals of helping to guide values-informed decision making by academic stakeholders and encouraging values alignment efforts by infrastructure providers. We also explore ways to structure this assessment framework both to avoid barriers to entry and to discourage the kinds of “gaming the system” activities that so often accompany audits and ranking mechanisms. We close by pointing to work we have recently undertaken: the development of the Values and Principles Framework and Assessment Checklist, which were issued for public comment in July-August, 2020 on CommonPlace (hosted by the Knowledge Futures Group).  …”

Next Generation Library Publishing Infrastructure ProjectRequest For Ideas Survey

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“The Next Generation Library Publishing project (NGLP) has a grant from Arcadia to invest in existing, emerging, and new infrastructure for library publishing, and we need your help in deciding how and where to invest those funds. This is your chance to help shape the future of library and other nonprofit publishing by identifying specific ways we might focus our project resources toward improvements large and small. 

Based on your experiences with existing publishing technologies and workflows, we request your input on how to improve the scholarly communication publishing infrastructure. Infrastructure projects might include new tools, improvements to existing tools, bridges between tools, hosted solutions, or even work on shared practice and standards. We are also interested in projects or initiatives that relate to this effort.
  
We are eager to see all your ideas, from single sentence wishes to brief proposals for already well-formulated plans. It may be something that you or your organization wants to work on or something that you wish others would do to make your life easier. No idea is too big or too small! …”

Encouraging Adherence to Values and Principles in Scholarly Publishing | Educopia Institute

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“Through the Next Generation Library Publishing project (2019-2022), Educopia Institute, California Digital Library, and Stratos, in close collaboration with COAR, LYRASIS, and Longleaf Services, seek to improve the publishing pathways and choices available to authors, editors, and readers through strengthening, integrating, and scaling up scholarly publishing infrastructures to support library publishers. In addition to building publishing tools and workflows, our team is exploring how to create community hosting models that align explicitly and demonstratively with academic values. …”

Next Generation Library Publishing | Educopia Institute

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“In this project, Educopia, California Digital Library (CDL), and Strategies for Open Science (Stratos), in close partnership with LYRASIS, Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), and Longleaf Services are working to advance and integrate open source publishing infrastructure to provide robust support for library publishing. Our project goals include:

Creating a more balanced, effective academic publishing ecosystem that aligns with academic values and increases choice, opportunity, and innovation via compelling library publishing solutions;
Developing tools and standards that allow better integration of campus repository systems and publishing workflows across the lifecycle of scholarly research;
Establishing sustainable, community-governed, open solutions that rival best-of-breed commercial tools and advance scholarly communication in important ways….”