2020 saw the launch of Community-led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM), a 3-1/2-year project funded by Research England and the Arcadia Fund. Bringing together open access (OA) publishers, librarians, academic researchers, and open source tool builders, COPIM has been working to develop new support systems for the long-term sustainability of OA book publishing and for better integrating OA books into universal knowledge systems. One critical aspect of COPIM's mission has been to develop new funding models for OA books and one of the results of that is the Open Book Collective (OBC), a non-profit charity that is a community of publishers, publishing services providers, librarians, and OA experts who manage and govern together the collective and its online platform, which has been designed to enable libraries and other research institutions to have a better ability to survey and gauge a wide variety of community-led OA initiatives (focused on books) that are seeking financial support. Funding OA initiatives, more and more, has become the purview of collections and collections development librarians, with whom the OBC has been built. In this way, the OBC is predicated on mutual aid and non-competitive collaboration. In this presentation, we would like to share the history of the development of the OBC as well as describe in further detail how the OBC works as both a values-based community and a web platform. One of the arguments we want to make is that, if we are devoted to transformative progress in the field of scholarly communications, we need a better diversity of partners working together on solutions and strategies for the long-term viability of OA publishing, and we especially need librarians and publishers to develop these solutions and strategies together and not in isolation.
Please log in to see more information.
