Pre-call: Stay in the loop about the upcoming Open Book Futures call for experimental book publishing pilots.
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Pre-call: Experimental Book Pilots | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)
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Category Archives: oa.openbookfutures
How to cultivate good closures: ‘scaling small’ and the limits of openness | Samuel Moore
Text of a talk given to the COPIM end-of-project conference: “Scaling Small: Community-Owned Futures for Open Access Books”, April 20th 2023.
Open access publishing has always had a difficult relationship with smoothness and scale. Openness implies seamlessness, limitlessness or structureless-ness – or the idea that the removal of price and permission barriers is what’s needed to allow research to reach its full potential. The drive for seamlessness is on display in much of the push for interoperability of standards and persistent identifiers that shape the infrastructures of openness. Throughout the evolution of open access, many ideas have been propagated around, for example, the necessity of CC BY as the one and only licence that facilitates this interoperability and smoothness of access and possible reuse. Similarly, failed projects such as One Repo sought to create a single open access repository to rule them all, in response to the perceived messy and stratified institutional and subject repository landscape.
Yet this relationship between openness and scale also leads to new kinds of closure, particularly the commercial closures of walled gardens that stretch across proprietary services and make researcher data available for increasing user surveillance. The economies of scale of commercial publishers require cookie-cutter production processes that remove all traces of care from publishing, in exchange for APCs and BPCs, thus ensuring that more publications can be processed cheaply with as little recourse to paid human labour as possible. Smoothness and scale are simply market enclosures by another name.
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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)
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?
£5.8 million funding to significantly expand and accelerate COPIM open access infrastructures | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)
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
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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