Speakers from the COPIM Project (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs) will present on the challenges facing libraries seeking to support Open Access (OA) for books. The first presentation will highlight the growing number of OA monograph initiatives, including COPIM’s own Opening the Future programme, and will place these in the context of the wider landscape and OA mandates/policies (eg: Plan S). A second presentation will discuss collaborative approaches for libraries and publishers and will showcase other elements of COPIM’s own work in this space, including Open Book Collective, and Thoth: all OA monograph partnerships between libraries, publishers and infrastructure providers.
Speakers:
- Professor Martin Paul Eve, Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London, a COPIM project co-lead and co-founder of the Open Library of the Humanities.
- Dr Joe Deville, Lancaster University, a COPIM project co-lead and co-founder of Mattering Press.
Q & A Panel
- Lucy Barnes is Editor and Outreach Coordinator at Open Book Publishers, a leading UK scholar-led, non-profit open access press. She does outreach for the COPIM Project and can be found on Twitter @alittleroad.
- Tom Grady works on the Opening the Future work package at COPIM on outreach to publishers and libraries, and lots in between. He was previously a founding team member of the UK’s first consortial OA press, White Rose University Press. He can be found on Twitter @scholtom
- Livy Onalee Snyder is a Library Outreach Associate for punctum books. She participates in Work Package 2 on the Open Book Collective as part of the COPIM Project and conducts outreach in the U.S. and Canada.
- Toby Steiner has a background in Cultural and Media Studies and has been working on Open Scholarship projects for more than ten years. In his current role as Project Manager of the Community-Led Open Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project, he looks after the variety of Work Packages that constitute COPIM. He can be found on Twitter @cmplxtv_studies
2020 and 2021 saw the emergence of several new OA monograph initiatives based on collective library funding. MIT Press launched Direct 2 Open, the University of Michigan Press started their Fund to Mission, and two university presses in Europe (Central European University Press and Liverpool University Press) launched Opening the Future collective funding programs, supported by the COPIM project. As other schemes emerge, libraries will increasingly need to be able to navigate and assess OA funding schemes more simply. OA monograph publishing needs to be sustainable not just for publishers, but also for libraries whose support they need. Libraries are already wrestling with transformative agreements, author affiliations and legacy subscriptions. How might they begin to evaluate which OA book programmes align best with their institution and deliver the most benefits important to them?
Meanwhile major funders, such as the cOAlition S group in Europe and UKRI in the UK, have recently published new policy statements that include OA books. It seems clear that candid discussion on OA book publishing – between libraries, publishers, and infrastructure providers – is highly relevant to OA Australasia attendees.