Category Archives: oa.thoth

Video recording: COPIM – SciELO 25 Years Seminar: Open Book Futures | SciELO YouTube

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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.

Event page: https://25.scielo.org/en/seminars/copim/

Slidedeck: Barnes, Lucy, Grady, Tom, Deville, Joe, Gatti, Rupert, & Steiner, Toby. (2023, July 13). Open Book Futures: Working together to Build Community-owned Infrastructures for OA books. COPIM – SciELO 25 Years Seminar “Open Book Futures: Working together to Build Community-owned Infrastructures for OA books”, online. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8142775

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

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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.

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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

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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.

 

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

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Barnes, M. (2023). Thoth Archiving Network Workshop, November 2022. Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.22f8d148

Our 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. The video of the first half of the workshop (the presentation portion) can be found here, with many thanks to the DPC for hosting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHgq1KWzgL4

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.

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COPIM final conference “Scaling Small: Community-Owned Futures for Open Access Books”: Presentation slidedecks | Zenodo

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Adema, Janneke, Barr, Peter, Bowie, Simon, Cole, Gareth, Deville, Joe, Fathallah, Judith, Grady, Tom, Grand, Philippa, Hall, Gary, McHardy, Julien, Kiesewetter, Rebekka, Mackay, Caroline, Moore, Samuel, Montgomery, Lucy, Ramalho, Amanda, & Tscheke, Nina. (2023, May 5). COPIM final conference “Scaling Small: Community-Owned Futures for Open Access Books”: Presentation slidedecks. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7898815

This deposit holds all slidedecks from presentations given during the two days of the final conference of the Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project, which was held on April 20 and 21, 2023, under the title of “Scaling Small: Community-Owned Futures for Open Access Books”.

Slidedecks & video recordings are also available via the conference website, at https://scalingsmall.pubpub.org/

 

 

Creating resilient publishing infrastructures | PubPub Community Spotlight

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Adema, J., Deville, J., Steiner, T., & Gulliford (Kearns), S. (2023). Creating resilient publishing infrastructures. PubPub Help. Retrieved from https://help.pubpub.org/pub/n5lqcqb4

In this Spotlight interview, we chat with a few of the folks at COPIM — Janneke Adema, Joe Deville, and Tobias Steiner — about the many work packages and projects that have come out of their organization. This includes, but is not limited to, the Open Book Collective, Experimental Publishing Compendium, Thoth, and their latest project Open Book Futures. Given all these ideas and projects, we talk about what it means to adapt as an organization with shifting funding all the while “scaling small.”

 

Building Effective Outreach Strategies for Open Access Book Initiatives: Lessons Learned from the Open Book Collective | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

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Deville, J., Fathallah, J., & Onalee Snyder, L. (2023). Building Effective Outreach Strategies for Open Access Book Initiatives: Lessons Learned from the Open Book Collective . Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.c0d717bc

As Open Access (OA) book publishers, and especially Diamond Open Access publishers, increasingly turn towards membership programs to support their work, effective outreach has become ever more important. For such publishers and for us at the Open Book Collective (OBC) sustainability depends on successfully convincing supporters that our work, and in our case that of the publishers and infrastructure providers that are our members, is relevant to the libraries and other organizations that we are asking for ongoing financial support. In many cases, this also means speaking not just about individual publications, publishers, or publishing service providers, but issues connected to OA publishing more widely. For that reason, a key feature of our outreach has been stimulating conversation and engagement around the OBC, the platform, and the future of OA books. 

In this blog post, we provide an account of how we have responded to the challenge of developing an effective outreach strategy, with the aim of sharing and archiving our experiences so that others may benefit from what we have learned, especially initiatives looking to engage with libraries and other institutional stakeholders. We document the development of the OBC’s outreach strategy and highlight the importance of effective outreach efforts in promoting wider access to scholarship.

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‘Good, Better, Best’: Practices in Archiving & Preserving Open Access Monographs | Zenodo

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Barnes, Miranda, Cole, Gareth, Fry, Jenny, Gatti, Rupert, & Higman, Ross. (2023). ‘Good, Better, Best’: Practices in Archiving & Preserving Open Access Monographs (1.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7876048

Good, Better, Best: Practices in Archiving & Preserving Open Access Monographs brings together the project’s growing knowledge and understanding around this community of practice, as well as reports on the Work Package’s research and development over the course of the project.

Following an introduction chapter giving a brief background landscape summary alongside employed methodologies, Chapter 2, ‘A basic guidebook for the small and scholar-led press’ considers good, better, and best practices around file formats, metadata, content packaging, existing routes to digital publication archives, archiving and preservation workflows, and challenges surrounding copyright, reuse, and licensing. Additional chapters detail the repository workflow experimentations, both manual and automated, as well as successful proof-of-concept archiving in two online repositories: one, and institutional repository, and the other, the Internet Archive. Along with a chapter (Chapter 6) that explores the current understanding around implications for archiving and preserving complex and experimental monographs, two further chapters (7 and 8) look at future work: the expansion and development of the Thoth Archiving Network and the new Open Book Futures project, beginning May 2023. Appendices include signposting to toolkits, guides, and resources, as well as a brief glossary that provides links to more comprehensive archiving and preservation glossaries already in existence. We hope this will be a useful resource for the small and scholar-led press community and beyond.

This is the final output of the Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project’s Work Package 7.

 

Add Thoth Open Access collection as a Community Zone | Have an idea for Ex Libris?

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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.

ScienceOpen and Thoth join forces on book metadata | ScienceOpen Blog

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by Nina Tscheke

To increase the discoverability and visibility for open books with richer and more interoperable metadata, ScienceOpen is happy to announce a new collaboration with Thoth, an open metadata management and dissemination platform. With this collaboration, open access book publishers and the entire book publishing ecosystem will benefit from a more interconnected digital publishing environment.

When we first started working with books and aggregating publicly available Crossref records via book DOIs to the ScienceOpen citation index, we quickly learned that the potential of Crossref records as actual metadata source was hardly recognized making for rather basic publicly availably records. Rich metadata was available mostly in ONIX , but while being the default format for distribution channels for book sellers and libraries, there tend to be data gaps in the ONIX information required for best practice usage in digital environments—speaking here esp. about persistent identifiers which are essential to keep records unified, connected and discoverable throughout the publication’s lifecycle.

Thanks to this new collaboration with Thoth, publishers will now be able to create a record on BookMetaHub, send it to Thoth for further enhancement, and then gain access to additional output formats for future export. We are also working on sending data created on Thoth to the BookMetaHub, so stay tuned!

 

COPIM and community-led infrastructures for open access books: where are we now and what’s next? | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

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by Lucy Barnes

This is a mirror of a post originally published on the OASPA blog: Lucy Barnes, ‘Guest post – COPIM and community-led infrastructures for open access books: where are we now and what’s next?’, OASPA blog, 11 April 2023

Since November 2019, the COPIM project has been building community-led systems and infrastructures to support and develop open access (OA) book publishing. We’ve focused particularly on how to enable smaller and medium-sized presses to thrive in an open access world, following the principle of ‘Scaling Small’: that publishing communities can grow their capacity to publish open access books through intentional collaboration and mutual support, fostering resilience and bibliodiversity through cooperation and knowledge-sharing rather than individual initiatives seeking to grow larger at the expense of ‘competitors’.

Our initial period of funding, generously given by the Research England Development Fund and Arcadia, is now coming to an end, so we wanted to share: what have we built, how can publishers use it, and what comes next?

 

 

How to Build a Publishers’ Catalogue · Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

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“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….” 

Open Book Publishers takes leading role in £5.8 million project to significantly expand open access book infrastructures

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“Open Book Publishers (OBP) is delighted to announce that we are part of a diverse international team leading a new open infrastructure initiative, Open Book Futures (OBF), to significantly advance the systems that support community-owned Open Access (OA) book publishing.

Funded by Arcadia and the Research England Development (RED) Fund and led by Lancaster University, Open Book Futures will build on the pioneering work of the COPIM project, in which OBP has been a key partner. This will involve a significant expansion of key COPIM infrastructures built by OBP developers Javier Arias and Ross Higman: the Thoth metadata management platform and the forthcoming Thoth Archiving Network. It will also include the development of technical protocols and infrastructure to enable presses to better integrate accessibility requirements into their workflows….”

£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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