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)

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.

[…]

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.

Implementing a Workflow for Combinatorial Books | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

Posted on December 2, 2022 by OATP primary

Bowie, S., Hall, G., & Kiesewetter, R. (2022). Implementing a Workflow for Combinatorial Books . Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). Retrieved from https://copim.pubpub.org/pub/combinatorial-books-documentation-workflows-post4

This is the fourth blogpost in a series documenting the COPIM/OHP Pilot Project Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers. You can find the previous blogposts here, here, and here.

Our aim in the Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers Pilot Project is among other things the development of a research, editorial, and publishing workflow that enables the creation of new combinatorial books out of existing open access books (or collections of books) in the Open Humanities Press (OHP) catalogue that are available for reuse. To support other publishers interested in establishing and maintaining similar workflows for combinatorial book publishing projects, we have been exploring how these kinds of books sit within more standardised or established print and online book production, dissemination, and preservation systems. The workflow we have created for OHP’s Combinatorial Books book series is available here: https://copim.pubpub.org/pub/workflow-for-combinatorial-books

In this blogpost, the publisher Gary Hall (OHP) and the Combinatorial Books series editor and developer Simon Bowie (COPIM) will share, via audio contributions, conceptual and practical insights around how we have created this publishing and technical workflow and how we have adapted it for Ecological Re-writing as Disappropriation. Situated Encounters with the Chernobyl Herbarium, the first book coming out of the Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers Pilot Project. Furthermore, we reflect on the socio-cultural adaptations to the editorial and publishing workflows that were needed to allow for more open and horizontal forms of community engagement.

[…]

A workflow for Combinatorial Books | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

Posted on December 1, 2022 by OATP primary

Adema, J., Bowie, S., Hall, G., & Kiesewetter, R. (2022). A workflow for Combinatorial Books. Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). Retrieved from https://copim.pubpub.org/pub/workflow-for-combinatorial-books

Experimental Book Publishing: Reinventing Editorial Workflows and Engaging Communities | CommonPlace, Series 2.2 Community-led Editorial Management

Posted on November 23, 2022 by OATP primary

Adema, J., & Kiesewetter, R. (2022). Experimental Book Publishing: Reinventing Editorial Workflows and Engaging Communities; Commonplace. https://doi.org/10.21428/6ffd8432.8998ab82

The publication of experimental, digital work engenders different roles and relationalities, requiring “a kind of collaboration among authors, editors, and technical staff that is quite different from the traditional publishing process

CfP Special Issue of Teknokultura: Emergence of critical experimental practices in publishing and digital posthumanities | Teknokultura. Revista de Cultura Digital y Movimientos Sociales

Posted on November 14, 2022 by OATP primary

As open access policies have become assimilated to the commercial dynamics of academic knowledge production and circulation, publishing processes in the academic setting have emerged as strategic spaces where to explore new styles of research and social intervention, as well as to transform the relationship between academia and political activism amidst the globalization and digitalization of capitalism. The anthology Whose Book is it Anyway? Views from Elsewhere on Publishing, Copyright, and Creativity, edited by Janis Jefferies and Sarah Kember (Open Book Publishers, 2020), problematizes the technicism and commercial orientation of mainstream discourses on open access that pervade most governments and higher education institutions. The authors call on us to think beyond technological ‘progress’ and copyright issues, and to focus for once on moral, political and social rights as well as concrete strategies for academic-led editorial practices driven not by profit, but by solidarity, critique, and creativity. From this feminist intersectional perspective, developed in the After Open Access Manifesto, the issue is no longer to be for or against copyright, or even open access, but to inaugurate and sustain new types of research and a more just future for academic publications within and beyond discourses of digitisation. This special issue calls on contributions that document and reflect on the emergence of critical experimental practices in publishing and digital posthumanities which have a feminist orientation and commitment to intervene in political and cultural debates on open access and open science. The goal is to map emergent discourses and practices on academic-led publishing across geographies and languages, including interpretations and controversies on open access and open science in different contexts as well as cultural critiques of instrumentalist understandings of technology and intellectual work in academic settings, all paying particular attention to feminist approaches to the problem of knowledges in the current crisis of globalization. Topics include but are not limited to:

Intersectional feminism and open access/open science debates in specific contexts
Editorial activisms in the digital sphere
Experimental, iterative and processual publishing led in academic settings
Feminist ethics in academic-led publishing
Platforms and knowledge economies
Geopolitics of academic knowledge
Socioenvironmental dimensions of academic publishing

Manuscripts should be submitted by September 15, 2023. They can be submitted in Spanish, English or Portuguese, must be original and not have been previously published or under consideration by other journals or publications.

Computational Publishing Pilot Project. Introducing Our Partners and Communities | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

Posted on November 10, 2022 by OATP primary

by Janneke Adema

Our last post on Computational Book Publishing by Simon Bowie kicked off our documentation of this COPIM WP6 Experimental Publishing Pilot Project, which consists of a collaboration between COPIM, the Open Science Lab at the Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) Hanover (working with Simon Worthington as the lead on this collaboration) and Open Book Publishers. The aim of this Pilot Project is to create a working prototype or proof of concept for the publication of computational books, based on real (sample) digital objects, and to adapt this to the publishing workflow of Open Book Publishers. The central question this pilot wants to address is how computational books—the combinations of text and executable code—can be integrated and made compatible with an existing publisher’s infrastructures and workflows for monograph publishing. We will be trying out various computational publishing tools to create this prototype, including Curvenote, Quarto, Jupyter Notebook, JupyterLab, and Jupyter Book.

As this Pilot has seen a changing set of partners and institutions involved during its gestation and as beyond these partners there are several connections to other projects and communities, we wanted to use this blogpost to introduce the communities that are currently involved in the Pilot and are contributing to the extended work plan that has been developed as part of this collaboration.

Adema & Kiesewetter (2022) Re-use and/as Re-writing | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

Posted on July 25, 2022 by OATP primary

Adema, J., & Kiesewetter, R. (2022). Re-use and/as Re-writing. Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.a351f151 Adema, J., & Kiesewetter, R. (2022). Re-use and/as Re-writing. Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.a351f151 Adema, J., & Kiesewetter, R. (2022). Re-use and/as Re-writing. Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.a351f151 Adema, J., & Kiesewetter, R. (2022). Re-use and/as Re-writing. Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.a351f151Adema, J., & Kiesewetter, R. (2022). Re-use and/as Re-writing. Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.a351f151

Depending on the type of open licence, open access publications allow for the re-use of already published content. In addition to this, collaborative editing and writing tools enable further engagement with and around published works by (communities of) authors. The interactive and collaborative potential of open books can add further value and new avenues and formats that go beyond the more obvious benefits of open access, such as, for example, enhancing the discovery and online consultation (Snijder, 2019) of scholarly publications.

Re-use can take different forms, being highly context-specific. Imagine, for example, a collage text entirely composed of text snippets, or a remix in which two existing texts are woven together in the fashion of a parallel montage. Re-use mobilises combinatorial creativity, or the process of combining existing ideas to produce something new, that can be perceived as a critique of the idea of the original genius, or, in the context of academia, of the single liberal humanist author (Popova, 2011). Re-use might also involve creating new communities and conversations around already existing books and texts, for example by means of gathering together comments and annotations, and adding hyperlinks. It can additionally foster experimentation with more social and open forms of performing humanities scholarship and scholarly interaction with and around books: for example, through open peer review and networked books. Other forms of re-use can be directed towards the updating, translating, modifying, reviewing, versioning, and forking of existing books. Combinatorial Books will experiment with such possibilities in theory and practice in order to stimulate, explore, and practice the full range of social book interactions made possible by open access. As such, it aims to promote the reuse of open access books as part of a workflow that enables the creation of new publications out of existing ones. Engaging with re-use in this way implies the adaptation of existing workflows, systems, practices, and licensing. However, these can be, as we hope to show in this series of blogposts, relatively simple, low-key adaptations that do not have to be labour- and cost-intensive and do not necessarily require advanced technological expertise.

[…]

Multimodal Digital Monographs: Content, Collaboration, Community

Posted on June 21, 2022 by OATP primary

by Allison Levy and Sarah McKee

An exploration of the current and future landscape of digital scholarly publishing, this paper reports the findings of a spring 2021 summit co-hosted by Brown University and Emory University on multimodal digital monographs. With its focus on scholarly content, the summit convened scholars, academic staff experts, and representatives from university presses. Case studies of eight recently published or in-development works provided the basis for in-depth, evidence-based discussions about the most pressing concerns and challenges facing stakeholders in digital scholarly publishing today. In particular, participants considered questions of cross-institutional collaboration, community engagement, professional development, open access, peer review, metadata and discoverability, preservation, and sustainability. Although the summit focused on a selection of projects supported by the Mellon Foundation’s Digital Monographs Initiative, the presentations and generative discussions that followed raised important concerns and opportunities that extend well beyond the initial aims of the featured projects. A key objective of this report is to promote greater inclusion and equitable access of diverse voices as the development, validation, and dissemination of multimodal digital monographs continues to unfold. Thus, this report serves as a starting point, to acknowledge the work that is already under way, to learn what we can from it, and to seek viable, sustainable means of furthering our shared mission to increase the visibility and reach of humanities scholarship to audiences both within and beyond the academy.

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