Job: Scholarly Publishing Outreach Officer, Opening The Future. Applications invited by Oct 08, 2023 | Birkbeck, University of London

COPIM is reshaping how knowledge dissemination is funded and accessed. Do you want to be part one of the most ambitious and impactful projects working in open access scholarly publishing today?

Your role will encompass three main areas: 

engagement and outreach; 
revenue model analysis and implementation; 
creating an OA books information hub.

You will take a leading role in library and publisher engagement for the Opening the Future (OtF) revenue model, a key part of COPIM’s ‘Open Book Futures’ project. A primary responsibility is building relationships with library supporters, partner publishers, and team colleagues. You will contribute to the success of the model by participating in marketing and outreach activities, including working with social media, writing press releases, conference proposals and reports, and organising events to bring stakeholders together. 

You will work with publishers to analyse their financial models and monograph backlists, writing persuasive business cases based on your analysis. In tandem with the OtF lead you will execute the implementation of the revenue model at three newly-joining presses. You’ll also liaise with the two original OtF presses to ensure their continued successful participation.

Working closely with project colleagues and partners Jisc and LYRASIS you will co-create an OA books information hub: collating and presenting resources, advice, and pathways to OA implementation for publishers.

To be successful in this role you will have:

An excellent understanding of open-access publishing and pertinent developments in the monograph and policy space.
Strong interpersonal, professional communications skills and the ability to build and maintain partner relationships.
Experience of writing well and to deadline for different audiences and different media/social media/channels.
The ability to keep track of a range of ongoing tasks and schedules.

In return the role offers you:

Opportunity to work remotely
Be part of a knowledgeable, committed, experienced and fun project team
Enjoy an international and diverse work atmosphere
Be part of an ambitious project bringing about real change in OA book publishing.

This opportunity would build on experience as: scholarly communications librarian, marketing officer, publishing assistant.

Contract

This role is offered on a fixed-term basis until 30 April 2026.

Salary and Benefits 

Grade 7 of the College’s London Pay Scale which is £42,365 rising to £48,424 per annum.  

Birkbeck offers a competitive salary and pension scheme, 31 days paid leave, flexible working arrangements and some of the most generous benefits in the HE sector, all while being located right in the heart of Central London. 

The salary quoted is on the College’s London Pay Scale which includes a consolidated Weighting/Allowance which applies only to staff whose normal contractual place of work is in the London area.

 

Event: Futuros a Libro Abierto: Trabajando juntos para construir infraestructuras de propiedad comunitaria para libros AA. 14 de julio, 2023 | SciELO 25 Años

Este seminario web presentará el trabajo del proyecto ‘Open Book Futures’ de COPIM, una colaboración internacional que construye diferentes tipos de infraestructura de propiedad comunitaria para desarrollar y fortalecer la publicación de libros de AA, y explorará cómo los miembros de la Red SciELO podrían participar y trabajar juntos con el equipo de COPIM para generar apoyo global para los libros de AA.

This webinar will introduce the work of COPIM’s ‘Open Book Futures’ project, an international collaboration building different types of community-owned infrastructure to develop and strengthen OA book publishing, and explore how members of the SciELO Network might engage and work together with the COPIM team to build global support for OA books.

SciELO webinar: Open Book Futures: Working together to Build Community-owned Infrastructures for OA books. July 14, 2023, 3.30pm (BST) | SciELO 25 Years

Over the last four years, the COPIM team have been developing open, community-governed infrastructure to support open access book publishing. This includes the Open Book Collective, which supports collective funding for OA books and infrastructures, and the Thoth metadata dissemination system, which enables publishers to easily create high-quality, open metadata to share their OA books as widely as possible. All of this infrastructure is community-owned and governed by its users. With £5.8 million from Arcadia and Research England to develop this infrastructure equitably as part of the ‘Open Book Futures’ project, the COPIM team want to find out how they can collaborate with, and learn from, the members of the SciELO network. How might what COPIM is building be useful to you? What are they currently missing? What are the possibilities for collaboration? Come along to this session, learn more about what COPIM is building, and share your perspective on how OA book publishing can best be nurtured and developed within SciELO and beyond.

 

Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium | PubPub

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium, edited by Gabriela Méndez Cota. 

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Ecological Rewriting is available open access (it can be downloaded for free):  

https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/ecological-rewriting/ 

Book description 

Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium is the first book in the Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers series. Supported by the COPIM project, it is the creation of a collective of researchers, students and technologists from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. Led by Gabriela Méndez Cota, this group of nine (re)writers annotate and remix The Chernobyl Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness by the philosopher Michael Marder and the artist Anaïs Tondeur (originally published in OHP’s Critical Climate Change series) to produce what is a new book in its own right – albeit one that comments upon and engages with the original. 

In the Mexican context, experiments with art, writing and technology have a history that is tied less to academic publishing or avant-garde scholarship and more to community-building and grassroots organising. It is important, then, that in creating Ecological Rewriting the collective led by Méndez Cota are inspired by locally influential Cristina Rivera Garza’s theorization of re-writing as dis-appropriation, rather than appropriation of another’s work. Alongside philosophical concepts such as Jean-Luc Nancy’s ‘literary communism’, Rivera Garza’s ethical poetics is here turned into the proposition that the reuse of open access materials does not need to be understood as appropriation or reappropriation of ‘knowledge’. Instead, it can be conceived as a creative exercise in ‘unworking’ or ‘disappropriating’ academic authorship which responds to The Chernobyl Herbarium’s invitation to think through (vegetal) exposure and fragility. Thus, the authors challenge property and propriety by creating singular, fragmentary accounts of Mexico’s relation with Chernobyl. In the process they explore ways of bearing witness to environmental devastation in its human and non-human scales, including the little-known history of nuclear power and the anti-nuclear movement in Mexico – which they intersect with an experimental history of plant biodiversity. The resulting book constitutes both a practical reflection on plant-thinking and a disruptive intervention into the conventions of academic writing.

Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium exists as an online version (https://doi.org/10.21428/9ca7392d.07cdfb82) and as a print version (forthcoming). The online version is an experimental publication with links to the original sections of The Chernobyl Herbarium that the writers responded to, so that the reader can follow an associative trail between the two publications.

 

Authors

Gabriela Méndez Cota, Etelvina Bernal Méndez, Sandra Hernández Reyes, Sandra Loyola Guízar, Fernanda Rodríguez González, Yareni Monteón López, Deni Garciamoreno Becerril, Nidia Rosales Moreno, Xóchitl Arteaga Villamil, Carolina Cuevas Parra

Editor Bio

Gabriela Méndez Cota is a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Philosophy at Universidad Iberoamericana, Ciudad de México. Inspired by deconstruction, psychoanalysis and technoscience feminism, her research explores the subjective and ethical dimensions of technological/political controversies in specific contexts. Her books include Disrupting Maize: Food, Biotechnology and Nationalism in Contemporary Mexico (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). Among other places, her work has appeared in New Formations, Media Theory, Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and the Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identities (2020). With Rafico Ruiz, she co-edits the open access journal of culture and theory, Culture Machine (culturemachine.net). Between 2019 and 2021 she led a practice-based educational initiative on critical/feminist/intersectional perspectives of open access, which included a collaboration with the COPIM project led by the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University, UK, and resulted in a collective rewriting of The Chernobyl Herbarium (Open Humanities Press, 2015).

Series 

Ecological Re-writing is published as part of the Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers series, edited by Janneke Adema, Simon Bowi

Building open infrastructure step-by-step: COPIM’s approach to open documentation via PubPub | PubPub Community Spotlight

by Tobias Steiner and Lucy Barnes

Following in the footsteps of PubPub’s interview with Janneke Adema, Joe Deville, and Toby Steiner, we wanted to take this opportunity to take a step back and reflect upon the different ways that we at Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) have been using PubPub to engage with the variety of different groups that constitute the COPIM community of communities and to document the COPIM project’s progress over time.undefined

Right from COPIM’s very early days, we have been focused on making values-led choices about the platforms we employ to collaborate on writing and publishing the output generated throughout the COPIM project’s Work Packages, thinking particularly about using open-source tools and platforms where possible, documenting our activities openly, and working anti-competitively within different communities.

As Toby has previously written about in more detail elsewhere, for internal purposes, we quickly settled on open-source tools such as Mattermost for team communications, Nextcloud & OnlyOffice for file sharing and collaboration on documents, and BigBlueButton, Jitsi, and edumeet as viable alternatives to omnipresent corporate tools Slack, Google Drive, and Zoom.

COPIM’s Outreach Working Group – which we had established early on to keep in touch between the different Work Packages on the overarching topic of Outreach – conducted a short exercise to scope options that would align with our set of values and quickly settled on running COPIM’s dedicated website, copim.ac.uk, via the Gitea repository-hosted static site generator Hugo. Conceptually, we conceived of the website as the “formal” window into the world of COPIM, where we would document key facts, official statements, and funder-facing reporting information such as an overview of Milestones and Deliverables.

We also wanted to have a more vibrant and flexible addition to that website, a space that would allow us to experiment with multimodal publishing, ranging from shorter blog posts documenting project workshops, to more expansive advocacy papers and actual long-form scholarship that was going to be written by the Work Package teams over the project’s initial lifespan of three years. What we wanted was really quite an ask: a place where we could write simple short posts, but also these more extended formal pieces that might be downloaded and shared as separate documents, together with the occasional embedded video – all of which could be curated into different collections in order to best showcase our work! And this is where PubPub entered the picture. Attracted by its (mostly) open-source foundationsundefined and following encouraging conversations with the KF team jointly led by our former colleague Dan Rudmann, the COPIM team decided to use PubPub as our official Open Documentation Site, which – as Dan has put it in our first ‘Hello World’ message – reflects “our strategies and aims by serving as a space for open documentation. Herein we will chronicle our efforts in research and implementation as they occur. We invite you to utilize PubPub’s commenting and annotation system to converse with us, as well.” (An Introduction to our Open Documentation site)

[…]

 

 

Webinar #2 on collective funding models for open access books, 19 July 2023, 2pm (BST) | Jisc

This is the second event in the series where library colleagues will discuss how their libraries are adapting policies and practices to meet the challenges of supporting open monographs.

In August 2021, UKRI launched a new open access policy, which for the first time includes a provision for long-form scholarly works including monographs, book chapters and edited collections published from 1 January 2024. In preparation for policy implementation, Jisc and the Open Access Books Network have come together to hold a series of online events which will focus on different publishing models for Open Access books. This online event is the second in the series, and in it, three library colleagues working in scholarly communications and open research will speak about how their libraries are at various stages of success in adapting policies and practices to meet the challenges of supporting open monographs.

 

Job: Project Manager: Open Access Publishing @ Open Book Futures. End-of-play 21 July 2023 | Jobs at Lancaster University

Salary:   £37,386 to £43,155 pro rata
Closing Date:   Friday 21 July 2023
Interview Date:   To be confirmed
Reference:  0296-23-R

Employment type: Fixed Term

Duration: 32 months (starting on September 1st)

Hours: Part time (0.64 FTE)

Location: Lancaster University, UK 

This is a 32-month, part-time appointment, to support a major new international, multi-institutional project led by Lancaster University and focused on developing infrastructures and practices to underpin the expansion of Open Access (OA) academic publishing. The project builds on the pioneering work of the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project. COPIM is nearing its conclusion and has involved launching initiatives such as the Open Book Collective, Thoth, and the Opening the Future revenue model. 

We are looking to appoint a Project Manager to the new project. You will be jointly appointed to the Department of Organisation, Work and Technology and the Department of Sociology, and will also collaborate with colleagues in Lancaster University Library. You will be working closely with the project Principal Investigator Dr Joe Deville, as well as the wider project team. This team comprises colleagues working in UK Universities, as well as non-academic partners including Open Access book publishers, infrastructure providers, and advocacy groups. Many partners are based outside the UK, including in the European Union, South Africa, and the USA. 

The Project Manager, in dialogue with the Principal Investigator, will lead the delivery of the project, including ensuring that the project remains on track throughout, that project milestones and deliverables are met, as well as liaising with and reporting to funders. 

You will possess a relevant degree level qualification, excellent project management skills and have experience of responsible administrative or managerial roles in a complex organisation, such as a university. You will have excellent communication, negotiation and persuasion skills with an ability to engage with staff across a range of contexts. You will also have proven financial and budget management skills and excellent writing skills. Ideally, you will also have an interest in Open Access publishing and/or scholarly libraries, as well as experience in disseminating news and/or project outputs to wider audiences, especially via Twitter.

We welcome applications from people in all diversity groups and can support family-friendly and flexible working policies on an individual basis.

You will be able to work some of your time remotely, with the exact proportion of remote working to be determined in discussion with the line manager and in accordance with University guidelines. There are also opportunties for family friendly, flexible working arrangements.  

Please upload a cover letter with your application.

This varied and challenging role offers wide scope for personal and professional development. Informal enquires may be directed to Dr Joe Deville at j.deville@lancaster.ac.uk

Open Position: Open Access Engagement Lead (full time) at Open Book Collective, end of play: July 9, 2023 | OBC Information Hub

The Open Book Collective is looking to appoint an Open Access Engagement Lead to support our outreach with diverse stakeholders, including academic libraries. This work is supported by the Open Book Futures project, funded by Arcadia and the Research England Development Fund.

The successful candidate can start from 1st September, or as soon practicable thereafter, with the position funded until the end of April 2026.

We are looking for someone to support engagement work both in person and remotely in UK/EU locations/timezones.

Closing date: 9th July 2023

About the role

We are looking for someone who understands what is at stake in the futures of Open Access publishing, ideally with a high level of experience in scholarly publishing and/or scholarly communication, who is passionate about supporting the work that the Open Book Collective is involved in.

You will take a leading role in our engagement work with diverse stakeholders. This includes leading outreach meetings and presenting at relevant events. You will engage our communities in your wider advocacy work, including in written outputs. You will also contribute to the ongoing development of OBC’s outreach strategy.

Duties include:

Publicly advocating for a fairer, more sustainable future for Open Access book publishing

Representing the OBC at outreach meetings, conferences, webinars

Building and sustaining relationships with library supporters and other stakeholders

Working with OBC colleagues to develop OBC outreach strategy

Generating income for the OBC by confirming support from stakeholders for OBC’s subscription offers

Contributing to reports to be sent to funders, project partners and other stakeholders, in collaboration with colleagues.

Assisting with project administrative duties, including collaborations with the Open Book Futures project Principal Investigator and other Work Package leads.

Working on other ad hoc tasks relating to OBC’s work, as necessary.

Essential experience/skills

Demonstrable understanding of the changing environment for scholarly communications and open access publishing models

Evidence of an ability to work both independently and collaboratively to maintain relationships with stakeholders in a complex and rapidly changing scholarly environment

Excellent presentation skills, including a track record of delivering engaging presentations to diverse stakeholders

Excellent interpersonal and team working skills, including an ability to work successfully in a collaborative environment with colleagues from culturally diverse backgrounds

Evidence of an ability to write well and confidently for different audiences

Fluency in English, both spoken and written

Willingness to travel

Willingness to support outreach work both in person and remotely in UK/EU locations/timezones

 Desirable experience/skills

A track record of engaging in public settings (e.g. in writing, on social media, at events) in debates about open access publishing

Extensive experience (two years or more) working in scholarly libraries/scholarly communications

Experience in developing customer relationship management and/or social media strategies

The Open Book Collective is committed to building diverse teams, with people from a range of backgrounds. Equity, inclusion and diversity are core values for us and the communities we support. We strive to ensure that our team reflects these values.

The Open Book Collective is UK-based organisation, however many colleagues work remotely.

Salary, term & benefits

£35,000 – £42,000 per year, depending on experience and country of residence

Start date: 1st September 2023, or as soon as practicable thereafter

End date: 30th April 2026

Full time

Some flexibility as to country of residence

25 days annual leave per year, plus national holidays

Flexible and remote working opportunities

About the application process

Applicants are invited to send a cover letter (no more than 3 pages) and CV to Joe Deville (joe[at]openbookcollective[dot]org).

Closing Date: 11pm GMT on Sunday 9th July 2023

 

 

The growing world of open access books | OPERAS Innovation Lab

Authors: Marta B?aszczy?ska, Graham Stone
Reviewers: Jadranka Stojanovski, Ronald Snijder

 

Welcome on board, scholarly innovation aficionados!

2023 is a very important year for open access books due to the high number and variety of developments supporting them. So, it felt like a great area to focus on with our first blog post from the series Innovation Lab’s Observatory. 

While the Lab aims to bring fresh news about novel approaches to different spheres of scholarly communication, we also wish to summarise and present highlights of important initiatives and projects that support innovation. 

Today’s topic is open access books, using this opportunity to introduce activities of the OPERAS Special Interest Groups (OA Business Models, Open Access Books Network) and projects (OPERAS-P, COPIM, Open Book Futures, PALOMERA) related to book publishing and the recently published ‘Collaborative models for OA book publishers’ white paper by the OPERAS Open Access Business Models Special Interest Group.

[…]

 

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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