First Annual General Assembly of Custodians (AGAC) | Open Book Collective Information Hub

by Francesca Corazza

The first Annual General Assembly of Custodians (AGAC) of the Open Book Collective will take place from August 28th until September 8th 2023.

The agenda of the AGAC will include an update on and approval by the Full Custodians of any annual activity reports, financial audits and annual financial statements, and any changes to the OBC’s Articles of Association (constitution).

Full Custodians will be able to put forward agenda items for the AGAC.

All OBC Custodians are welcome to participate in the AGAC (although only Full Custodians can vote in binding votes). If you are an Associate Custodian and you would like to attend the meeting, please contact the administrative secretary at francesca@openbookcollective.org by August 21st.

 

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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.

 

Snyder & Fathallah (2023) Sustainable Futures for OA Books: The Open Book Collective | The Journal of Electronic Publishing

Snyder, L. O. & Fathallah, J., (2023) “Sustainable Futures for OA Books: The Open Book Collective”, The Journal of Electronic Publishing 26(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.3372

Abstract:

This article describes and explains the need for the work of the Open Book Collective (OBC). The OBC is a major output of the COPIM project (Community-Led Infrastructures for Open Access Monographs). The collective will bring together diverse small-to-medium open access (OA) publishers, open publishing service providers, libraries, and other research institutions to create a new, mutually supportive, and interdependent community space and platform designed to sustainthe future of OA book publishing. The OBC is founded upon equitable, community-led governance and helping publishers move beyond Book Processing Charges (BPCs). Central to the functioning of the Open Book Collective is an online platform that will make it far quicker and easier for libraries and other potential subscribers to compare, evaluate, and subscribe to different OA publishers and open service providers via membership packages. The OBC supports small-to-medium OA publishers by way of the COPIM (Community-Led Publication Infrastructures for Open Access Books) philosophy of “scaling small.” This allows publishers and other members to operate sustainably and collaboratively whilst retaining their diverse and singular editorial missions, rather than operating from philosophies centered on economic growth, competition, and monopoly.

 

The OBC Welcomes University of Manchester Library | 6 March 2023 | Open Book Collective

“As a member of the UK’s prestigious Russell Group, Manchester University is recognised as a world-leading research institution. You can read more about the University’s commitment to Open Access (OA) at their website here. Thanks to Manchester University’s support, the flourishing of a more bibliodiverse landscape for scholarly books is better assured. By becoming a member of the Open Book Collective, libraries have the opportunity to evaluate, compare, and support a bespoke range of small-to-medium Open Access book publishers and groups that are building important technical infrastructure for the creation and curation of OA books, and are also able to combine initiatives in any way they see fit, as well as support the OBC as a whole, thereby enabling libraries to support OA books in ways that allow them to demonstrate that their investments in OA books have broad impact in multiple sectors of the landscape of scholarly communications. The OBC, and the librarians who support it, are committed to a more equitable landscape for OA books and moving away from author-facing Book Processing Charges, our members are committed to collaborative, horizontal modes of working together on opening access to scholarly books for readers globally, without monetary, technical, or other barriers….”

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

“…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….”