Join this panel discussion with Q&A to find out more about the recently launched PALOMERA project funded by Horizon Europe as part of their call: Reforming and enhancing the European R&I System. The project seeks to understand why so few open access funder policies include books, and to provide actionable recommendations to change this.
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The Open Access Books Network (OABN) is working with the PALOMERA project, a two-year initiative funded by HORIZON Europe that seeks to investigate why so few Open Access (OA) funder policies include OA books, and to provide actionable recommendations to change this.
We will be hosting a PALOMERA Series of events that will provide a forum for anyone interested in open access book publishing to:
engage with PALOMERA via the OABN,
contribute your knowledge and expertise as the project progresses,
offer feedback to help shape PALOMERA’s outputs and recommendations.
We want to gather a broad group of representatives from different stakeholders in open access book publishing, as we did for our Voices from the OA Book Community workshop series in 2021, and enable you to contribute to the PALOMERA project via the PALOMERA Series.
Launch event
We will host a launch event on Tuesday 28 March at 3pm BST / 4pm CEST where you will hear from some of the project’s leaders, including Niels Stern (OAPEN/DOAB) and Ursula Rabar (OPERAS/OAeBU). You will have the opportunity to ask questions about the project and to let us know the best ways for you to engage with PALOMERA. The event will also be recorded.
Sign up for the launch event: it’s free and everyone is welcome!
Please also share the link with anyone who might be interested.
Christina Drummond (Executive Director of the OA eBook Usage Data Trust) and Lucy Montgomery (Professor of Knowledge Innovation at Curtin University and co-lead of the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative) discuss the OAeBU Usage Data Trust project and the new developments its work will take over the coming years.
Lucy Montgomery’s slides are available here: https://zenodo.org/record/7309149
Eric will be speaking on Thursday 17th November at 3pm GMT about his work with Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders, and how these experiences have informed his perspectives on the early days of open access and more recent developments in OA books. Sign up here!
You’ve probably heard of “Green” OA (Open Access), “Gold” OA, maybe something new-fangled like “Diamond” or “Quartz” OA. But you probably haven’t heard of “OG OA, and I’m hear to tell you about it. New-fangled it’s definitely not! OG is short for “Original Gangster”, not “Old Guy”, athough…
“Original Gangster” in modern slang refers to someone who is “Old School”. An OG was cool before cool even existed, and has overcome hurdles the young kids wouldn’t ever understand. The OG has such original style that who even cares about fashion or trends?
The OG of Open Access is Project Gutenberg. Before the Kindle, before the web, before the PC, Michael Hart started typing in “texts” and making them available online. For free, though you had to pay for the phone time. The original ebook was never meant to be the clunky reader gadgets that corporations were trying to sell, it was bits you could get online. Project Gutenberg invented the ebook as we know it.
Fifty one years later, Project Gutenberg is going stronger than ever. This month, it will post its 70,000th publication, most of them public domain, and all of them free. Every year, readers download 50 million ebooks from Project Gutenberg, making it second only to Amazon in terms of ebooks delivered. More than one billion-dollar company has gotten its start by doing interesting things with text from Project Gutenberg.
September is over, the leaves are turning and the OABN coordinators can no longer pretend that it’s still summer – so we write with updates and announcements for the autumn! These include forthcoming events on OA usage data, the Gutenberg Project, and OA books on climate change, as well as a refreshed website to better showcase the resources that the OABN has to offer, and plans for a forthcoming blog post series on the platforms publishers use to share their OA books.
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Jill Claassen, University of Cape Town busts a widespread myth about OA books: ‘Open Access for books is only affordable for funded authors from rich institutions’.
Join the Open Access Books Network (OABN) for this chat with Eric Hellman to hear more about his work with Project Gutenberg and how it has informed his perspectives on developments in OA books more broadly.
It is now widely acknowledged that climate change is a global issue that must be addressed with urgency. Open access research on this topic can be shared at speed, without barriers, so that anyone can read the latest expert knowledge in this area and use it to inform their work, their policymaking or their daily lives.
During Open Access Week, the Open Access Books Network will bring together a panel including authors, publishers and campaigners to discuss the impact of open access books related to the climate and the environment. They will discuss how open access affects the impact and dissemination of research on climate issues, with reference to their own work and to the wider context of academic publishing. They will also explore what more needs to be done to tackle access to climate research, and how open access books can play a role in that change.
Participants:
– David Collings, Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change
– Lucy Barnes, Open Book Publishers
– Melissa Hagemann, Senior Program Officer at Open Society Foundations and Steering Committee member for the Open Climate Campaign
Join the Open Access Books Network (OABN) in a chat with Christina Drummond and Lucy Montgomery to discuss the OAeBU Usage Data project and the new developments the work will take over the coming years.
The Open Access Books Network (OABN) is a relatively new kid on the block, but it punches above its weight. Our most significant series so far was the Voices from the OA Books Community, devoted to exploring different aspects of policy for OA books.
During the heated discussions, what were the main areas of consensus and which topics emerged as especially controversial? Which aspects of OA policy for books perplexed the community and provoked more questions than answers? In this session we will hear from session leaders and participants as they paint a nuanced picture of a necessary but complex endeavour: how to directly engage the OA books community in developing policies that will materially affect its future.
The Open Access Books Network (OABN) is pleased to share that it has become an OPERAS Special Interest Group (SIG), and as such it is now formally supported by OPERAS, the European Research Infrastructure supporting open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in the European Research Area.
Martin Paul Eve, Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at the University of London’s Birkbeck College, busts a widespread myth about OA books: If I publish my book Open Access, I won’t have control over my work.
This roundtable discussion, chaired by Tom Mosterd, one of the three coordinators at the Open Access Books Network (OABN) and Community Manager at the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), will highlight three different experiences of how to make Open Access book publishing work in an equitable and sustainable way:
Charles Watkinson (Associate University Librarian for Publishing and Director of University of Michigan Press) will share his experience from a more ‘traditional’ university publisher that is now developing a consortial library publishing programme, called Fund to Mission, to significantly step up their OA book publishing and to move away from a Book Processing Charge (BPC) model as they do so.
Demmy Verbeke (Head of Artes, KU Leuven Libraries and associate professor of Open Scholarship at the Faculty of Arts, KU Leuven) will discuss how KU Leuven Libraries have developed a fund called Fair OA Fund, which has been designed to make sure there is institutional money available to support innovative and non-profit OA initiatives, including books, journals, and infrastructure, alongside APCs/BPCs and TAs.
Lucy Barnes (COPIM and Open Book Publishers) will talk about building community-owned and governed infrastructure to support and expand the publication of OA books, and the importance of international partnerships in funding, sharing and publishing OA.
This interview is one of the outputs of the online series OA Books Workouts: Scholars at Work, a project of the Open Access Books Network. The aim of the series is to share good practices regarding the writing, production, and technicalities of publishing an open access book.
Miklóss Kiss is Associate Professor of Audiovisual Arts and Cognition at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. His research focuses on contemporary audiovisual media, intersecting the fields of narrative and cognitive film theories.