Register now! COPIM “Scaling Small: Community-Owned Futures for Open Access Books” conference, April 20 & 21, 2023 @ online | Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

Posted on March 24, 2023 by OATP primary

Save the date & register now! The Community-Led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Monographs project (COPIM) is happy to announce its Final Conference,“Scaling Small: Community-Owned Futures for Open Access Books”, to take place online on April 20, 3.30-8.15pm (BST), and April 21, 3-7pm (BST).

Full programme online at: https://scalingsmall.pubpub.org/programme-overview

The Scaling Small philosophy (see e.g. Adema & Moore, 2021) that COPIM has been following is explicitly and intentionally an alternative to large-scale, commercial approaches to academic publishing. This principle has guided COPIM’s main outcomes and objectives, and has supported us in building various models, systems, and platforms as part of our work to start removing the hurdles preventing new and existing open access book initiatives from adopting open access workflows. In addition to creating the community-led governance structures, archiving and preservation best practices, and experimental book pilots and resources to support this, Scaling Small comes to the fore very clearly in three of COPIM’s main outputs: the Open Book Collective (OBC), a UK charity governed by its members that brings together open access publishers, libraries, and publishing service providers to enable sustainable collective funding for open access books without charging authors; ‘Opening the Future’ (OtF), a revenue model which enables the transition of legacy publishers to OA by offering their closed access backlist to libraries via a subscription scheme, and using the revenue to fund new OA books; and Thoth, an open dissemination system that enables publishers to share their open access books much more widely, by easily creating high quality open metadata in a wide variety of formats.

As COPIM concludes, we hope to discuss and extend the organisational principle of Scaling Small in several ways, and with a variety of collaborators, while also thinking ahead about what our next steps will be in the future.

Event: COPIM End-of-project conference “Scaling Small: Community-Owned Futures for Open Access Books”, April 20 & 21, 2023 @ online. Full programme now live! | Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs

Posted on March 14, 2023 by OATP primary

The Community-Led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Monographs project (COPIM) is happy to announce its Final Conference,

“Scaling Small: Community-Owned Futures for Open Access Books”,

which will take place online on April 20, 3.30-8.15pm (BST), and April 21, 3-7pm (BST).

A new model for computational book publishing | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

Posted on March 14, 2023 by OATP primary

by Simon Bowie

As part of COPIM’s pilot project looking at computational book publishing, we’ve worked on a new technical model and workflow for publishing computational books using a combination of Jupyter Notebook, Quarto, and GitHub Pages. This blogpost outlines the details of this model and further blogposts in this series will examine how we have applied it practically to produce some computational publications.

[…]

Keynote panel: Experimental Books – Re-imagining Scholarly Publishing, 13 March, 16:50-18:45 (GMT) | Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

Posted on March 6, 2023 by OATP primary

16:50-17:00 (GMT): Welcome

Prof. Gary Hall (COPIM, Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University)

17:00-18:30: Keynote panel session with a response by Dr. Lozana Rossenova (Open Science Lab, TIB Hannover)

Writing a Book As If Writing a Piece of Software
Keynote by Dr. Winnie Soon (Course Leader at the Creative Computing Institute, University of the Arts London, Associate Professor (on leave) at Aarhus University, visiting researcher at the Centre of the Study of the Networked Image (CSNI), London South Bank University)

The term “computational publishing” has emerged in recent scholarship and is used specifically to describe books as dynamic and computational objects that are open to re-versioning. Within this specific genre of computational publishing, this presentation focuses on characteristics and common approaches like free and open source software, community practices and programmable processes by discussing three examples. They are related to a Git repository, collaborative publishing software and a DIY book to explore the possible computational extensibility that is oriented more toward collective interventions, actions and practices. These examples examine a parallel between writing and coding that blurs the boundary between books and software, arguing that writing (publishing) a computational book is like writing (publishing) a piece of software.

Digital Space as Indigenous Territory, Scholarly Writing as Relational Practice: Reflections from the Collaborative Production of an Open Access Book
Keynote by Prof. Paige Raibmon (Department of History, University of British Columbia (UBC)).

As I Remember it is an open access digital book that shares teachings presented by the ?a?am?n Elder and knowledge keeper Elsie Paul with wide-ranging audiences. Paul collaborated in order to produce this work with two of her grandchildren, Davis McKenzie and Harmony Johnson, and myself, a historian based at the University of British Columbia. In this talk, I share discuss our multi-year, collaborative process in which we strove to design a digital book whose form aligns with the meanings embedded within the its content (i.e. the teachings as shared and remembered by Paul). Principles of relationality, respect, and humility were central to our methodology and helped us navigate the potential promise and pitfalls of bringing Indigenous knowledge into an open access digital space. Using a range of means, we visibly and interactively embedded ?a?am?n authority over ?a?am?n knowledge into the book. We invite readers to approach the book as guests of a ?a?am?n host; and to consider the website itself as ?a?am?n territory. Thus, this digital book attempts to do something quite different than simply sharing information about Paul’s life. It challenges wide-spread assumptions about scholarly method, production, authorship, expertise, and copyright.

I invite and encourage people to explore the book before my talk at: ravenspacepublishing.org/as-i-remember-it/

18:30-18:45: Closing Remarks

Dr. Janneke Adema (COPIM, Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University)

Open Book Publishers Joins the Open Book Collective | Feb 24, 2023

Posted on March 2, 2023 by OATP primary

“…We are joining the OBC because we believe that the best future for academic book publishing lies in collectively funded, equitable open access for books. We believe in the value of non-profit, community-owned open infrastructures to underpin this shift, and we support collaborative ways of working to achieve our goals. The OBC reflects all these values. The Collective realises the strength of collaboration and mutual effort in two ways: firstly, because it brings together a range of OA book initiatives that share core values and are seeking collective funding, forming a powerful collection of books and initiatives and making it easier for libraries to find, assess and support the OA books that these initiatives have to offer; secondly, because a proportion of the revenue a press receives from libraries via the OBC will go into a development fund to which any open access press or initiative can apply in order to strengthen their work….”

Punctum Books Helps Build Streamlined System for Archiving Open Access Monographs | Internet Archive Blogs

Posted on February 22, 2023 by OATP primary

by Caralee Adams

Since its founding in 2011, punctum books has been an independent, scholar- and queerled open access (OA) press committed to reshaping the way knowledge production is shared in academia and beyond.

Now, it is also a key player in the development of technology that’s making it easier for publishers to archive open access monographs.

The idea behind the open access movement is that scholarly research is a public good that should be made available to everyone in order to remove some of the technological and financial barriers to research and to accelerate education and research across the planet. Open access monographs are long-form scholarly publications released in the public domain under a Creative Commons or comparable license, which allows readers to freely access them without paywall. Authors of open access publications retain the copyright to their work.

“We strongly believe that publicly funded knowledge should be publicly available,” said Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, co-director of the non-profit publisher, along with Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy. “This is an ideological commitment — and, for us, this has been a guiding light in all our publishing work.”

Recently, punctum published its entire catalogue of close to 400 books to the Internet Archive’s online collection. It includes books about queer studies, film and media studies, Anthropocene studies, recuperative work and titles dealing with the Medieval period.

[…]

Scaling Small: Community-Owned Futures for Open Access Books

Posted on February 14, 2023 by OATP primary

“The Scaling Small philosophy (see e.g. Adema & Moore, 2021) that COPIM has been following is explicitly and intentionally an alternative to large-scale, commercial approaches to academic publishing. This principle has guided COPIM’s main outcomes and objectives, and has supported us in building various models, systems, and platforms as part of our work to start removing the hurdles preventing new and existing open access book initiatives from adopting open access workflows. In addition to creating the community-led governance structures, archiving and preservation best practices, and experimental book pilots and resources to support this, Scaling Small comes to the fore very clearly in three of COPIM’s main outputs: the Open Book Collective (OBC), a UK charity governed by its members that brings together open access publishers, libraries, and publishing service providers to enable sustainable collective funding for open access books without charging authors; ‘Opening the Future’ (OtF), a revenue model which enables the transition of legacy publishers to OA by offering their closed access backlist to libraries via a subscription scheme, and using the revenue to fund new OA books; and Thoth, an open dissemination system that enables publishers to share their open access books much more widely, by easily creating high quality open metadata in a wide variety of formats….”

COPIM conference “Experimental Books – Re-imagining Scholarly Publishing” – Part One, 20 February 2023 @ online | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs

Posted on February 14, 2023 by OATP primary

COPIM’s Experimental Publishing group is delighted to announce Experimental Books: Re-imagining Scholarly Publishing, the final conference of COPIM’s Experimental Publishing and Reuse work package including talks, roundtables, and workshops, exploring archival data performances, re-using as re-writing, and computational books. 20 February, 9 March, & 13 March 2023 REGISTER NOW: https://experimentalbooks.pubpub.org/ This three-part conference – including talks, roundtables, and workshops – will discuss alternative publishing options for the humanities by showcasing some of the experiments that are currently taking place in the realm of academic book publishing. It aims to inspire authors, publishers, technology developers and others, to (continue to) speculate on new collaborative futures for open humanities research and publication. It also aims to discuss how these book experiments could sit within more standardised or established workflows for print and online book production, dissemination, and preservation.

Part One: Monday, 20 February 2023

13:00-13:20 (GMT)

Welcome & Conference Outlook

Dr. Janneke Adema (COPIM, Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University)

13:20-14:40

Introducing Computational, Combinatorial, and Data Books

A roundtable conversation with Dr. Janneke Adema (COPIM, Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University), Simon Bowie (COPIM, Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University), Joana Chicau (Creative Computing Institute, University of the Arts London), Prof. Gary Hall (COPIM, Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University), Dr. Kat Jungnickel (Goldsmiths, University of London), Dr. Julien McHardy (COPIM), Dr. Gabriela Méndez Cota (Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México, Department of Philosophy), Rebekka Kiesewetter (COPIM, Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University), Dr. Simon Worthington (Open Science Lab, TIB Hannover)

COPIM’s Experimental Publishing Work Package has worked with authors, designers, developers, providers of open source platforms and tools, and publishers on a series of Pilot Projects that are examining ways to align existing open source software, tools, workflows and infrastructures for experimental publishing with the workflow of open access book publishers. To do so, we have co-developed a set of pilot experimental academic books together with the scholar-led presses Open Humanities Press, Mattering Press, and Open Book Publishers.

This roundtable session serves as a pre-launch for the resulting pilot books Archival Conversations, Ecological Re-writing as Disappropriation. Situated Encounters with the Chernobyl Herbarium, and X-Sketchbook. Joined by many of the involved makers and writers, we will collectively reflect on the journey that lead to these books and, looking forward, looking back, consider what it takes to nurture experimentation in scholarly publishing.

14:40-15:00 Coffee Break

15:00-17:00

Publishing from Collections: Introducing Computational Publishing for Culture

Workshop with Dr. Simon Worthington (Open Science Lab, TIB Hannover)

Computational publishing was developed in the life sciences and STEM subjects to allow publishers and authors to embed executable code, visualisations and advanced media objects alongside conventional text in a document. This hands-on workshop demonstrates one way how humanities scholars might use computational publishing.

During the workshop, we will auto-compile catalogue publications for exhibitions or publication listings from multiple open data sources; and show how such compilations can be published multi-format: web, PDF, ebook, etc. A series of exercises, using Jupyter Notebooks for code and the Quarto platform to wrap up the notebooks for multi-format outputting, will give participants a practical introduction to some of the tools, possibilities and concepts of computational publishing.

Participation in this workshop is limited. Please register HERE.

17:00-17:15 Coffee Break

17:15-18:30

De-schooling rewriting: or the promise of desapropiación

Keynote by Dr. Gabriela Méndez Cota (Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México, Department of Philosophy)

Cristina Rivera Garza’s theory and practice of desapropiación has inspired numerous rewriting experiments in the Mexican context, among them the rewriting of The Chernobyl Herbarium by graduate students and early career researchers in collaboration with COPIM.

Save the date: COPIM final conference “Scaling Small: Community-Owned Futures for Open Access Books”, April 20 & 21, 2023 @ online | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

Posted on February 13, 2023 by OATP primary

The Community-Led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Monographs project (COPIM) is happy to announce its Final Conference,

“Scaling Small: Community-Owned Futures for Open Access Books”,

which will take place online on April 20, 3.30-8.15pm (BST), and April 21, 3-7pm (BST). Save the date!

As COPIM concludes, we hope to discuss and extend the organisational principle of Scaling Small in several ways, and with a variety of collaborators, while also thinking ahead about our next steps.

Automated archiving: a case study | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

Posted on February 3, 2023 by OATP primary

by Ross Higman

In a previous post, I summarised initial investigations by COPIM’s archiving and preservation team into the possibilities for automated archiving. This followed on from earlier experiments with manual workflows, which highlighted the prohibitive time investment that would be necessary for small and scholar-led publishers to manage archiving in this way. Due to the rich and well-structured nature of metadata within Thoth, and the options available for integrating the Thoth software with archiving platforms, we concluded that a basic level of automated ingest would be both worthwhile and eminently achievable. Three months later, we obtained proof of concept with a bulk upload of over 600 Thoth works to the Internet Archive.

This blog post will explore the steps taken to accomplish this, providing pointers for anyone looking into implementing a similar system themselves, as well as giving some background for publishers interested in joining the Thoth programme to take advantage of this feature. All code used in the process is available on GitHub under an open-source licence, as is standard for the COPIM project. The post will also outline our plans for building on this initial work as we start to develop the Thoth Archiving Network.

[…]

Thoth Archiving Network Workshop, November 2022 | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

Posted on February 2, 2023 by OATP primary

by Miranda Barnes

COPIM Work Package 7’s Thoth Archiving Network workshop was held virtually on Tuesday, 2nd November 2022. Around 30 participants attended, and we thank all of you who participated and provided feedback.

Work Package 7 Lead Gareth Cole began the workshop with a presentation, updating attendees on the activities of the COPIM Project, including Opening the Future (Work Package 3), the Open Book Collective (Work Package 4), and the Thoth metadata management system (Work Package 5), Experimental Publishing (Work Package 6), and of course, Archiving & Preservation (Work Package 7).

Gareth explained the overall values and goals of the COPIM Project and introduced the core objectives and activities of each work package. This led into the important discussion of the proposed Thoth Archiving Network, a collaboration between Work Packages 5 and 7, to create a simple dissemination system for small publishers to archive their monographs in a network of participating institutional repositories. Proof-of-concept has been developed and tested, and several universities have already agreed to take part.

Small and scholar-led presses make up much of the “long tail” of publishers without an active preservation policy in place, putting their significant contributions to the scholarly record at risk. While large-scale publishers have existing agreements with digital preservation archives, such as CLOCKSS and Portico, the small press often languishes without financial or institutional support, alongside challenges in technical expertise and staff resource. The Thoth Archiving Network would not solve every issue, but it would be an initial step towards essential community infrastructure, allowing for presses to use a push-button deposit option to archive their publications in multiple repository locations. This would create an opportunity to safeguard against the complete loss of their catalogue should they cease to operate.

For the second half of the workshop session, the attendees and COPIM colleagues were divided into three breakout rooms. The same two questions were posed for each group: ‘Would you be interested in joining the Thoth Archiving Network?’ and ‘What are the potential barriers for you joining the Thoth Archiving Network?’.

[…]

COPIM conference “Experimental Books – Re-imagining Scholarly Publishing”, 20 February, 9 March, & 13 March 2023 @ online | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs

Posted on February 2, 2023 by OATP primary

20 February, 9 March, & 13 March 2023

This three-part conference – including talks, roundtables, and workshops – will discuss alternative publishing options for the humanities by showcasing some of the experiments that are currently taking place in the realm of academic book publishing.

It aims to inspire authors, publishers, technology developers and others, to (continue to) speculate on new collaborative futures for open humanities research and publication. It also aims to discuss how these book experiments could sit within more standardised or established workflows for print and online book production, dissemination, and preservation.

How can I persuade my institution to support collective funding for open access books? | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (Part One) · Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

Posted on January 23, 2023 by OATP primary

By Lucy Barnes and Tom Grady

As part of our work at COPIM, we speak to a lot of librarians. Many are personally convinced of the need to support collective funding models for open access (OA) books because these serve as equitable alternatives to the Book Processing Charge model,[undefined] but many librarians find themselves in the position of needing to convince their management team or budget holders to invest in Open Access initiatives.

For librarians who find themselves in this position, we have compiled a list of resources and arguments to help inform decisions to invest in OA monograph initiatives. This will be a two part blog post: in the first we’ll give some background by laying out the problems with Book Processing Charges (BPCs) and disentangling the various alternative models; in Part Two we’ll go into more detail, with practical steps on how colleagues might convince their budget holders to invest in collective funding models.

So, why should a library or institution invest in collective funding for open access books?

[…]

How can I persuade my institution to support collective funding for open access books? (Part Two) | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

Posted on January 23, 2023 by OATP primary

This is the second part of a two-part blog post. Part One explores why your institution should support collective funding for open access books. This second post highlights practical steps you can take to build a case to management for supporting collective OA book funding.

How can I persuade my institution to support collective funding for open access books? (Part Two) · Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

Posted on January 12, 2023 by OATP primary

“As Sharla Lair at LYRASIS says “The transformation of scholarly publishing happens one investment at a time. You can’t do everything, but you can do something.” In the UK, several libraries (including the Universities of St Andrews, Manchester, Sussex, and Salford, among others) are all implementing innovative strategies to enable ethically-aligned support for OA that mesh with budget constraints. The university KU Leuven has an approach worth studying (more on this below), as does that of Utrecht, Iowa State University, the University of Kansas, Guelph, Temple University, University of California and MIT Library. But even libraries that are not in a position to make strategic overhauls can still agree criteria by which they can start to assess deals.

Practical approaches – a case study from the library at KU Leuven…

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