Our values

The Copim community shares a commitment to building an open, inclusive, diverse and community-led ecosystem for the creation and dissemination of open access books, one in which all knowledge producers are maximally empowered to communicate their research to the benefit of society and without economic or technical barriers.

Below you will find a list of our guiding values and principles. However, as all values are contextual and situated, we will always remain critical of friction-free utopias. Hence, we see our values and principles as a process of working towards, and of working with and across difference. This page should be read as a reflection of intention. We don’t see friction or conflict in defining our values as a hindrance but as a part of our working mode. Therefore, we will continue to update this page as we progress forward and as our surrounding environment changes.

At the bottom of this page, under ‘Further reading’, you will find links to recent publications in which we discuss and articulate our community values.

1. Bibliophilia

(Love and care for books)

We love books and value excellent content, considered design, good open principles and user-friendliness. We are dedicated to (different forms of) quality peer review. We care for the preservation and archiving of open access books and argue for careful and broad open dissemination. We work to enable open books of many kinds being shared as widely as possible.

2. Community-led

(Driven by the community of communities dedicated to public knowledge and the love of the book)

• We pledge to create inalienable systems that cannot be co-opted or overtaken by the interests of a few players or commercial entities.

• We will remain community-driven and non-competitive, and encourage horizontal structures empowering the community to make strategic, operational, and financial decisions.

• We want to support a broader network or ecosystem of community-led scholarly communications organisations dedicated to the production and long-term maintenance of an open commons.

3. Open and public knowledge

(Inclusive, open source, open access and open ways of working)

• We support open infrastructures and interoperability between open infrastructures, and pledge to work towards openness in all of the ways in which we run our projects and organisations.

• We will be dedicated to public knowledge that is open and shareable across multiple borders.

• We support open source, portability and open standards, and metadata reuse and reproducibility (copyright).

4. DEI

(Diversity, equity and inclusion)

• We will be governed by representatives from a broad cross-section of stakeholders. For more information, please see our Governance & project management page.

• We work towards supporting a plurality of research subjects, technologies, approaches, languages, nations and agents (whether they be scholars, the academic and research community or the general public).

• We aim to traverse multiple discipline, geographic, national and institutional boundaries.

• We strive for inclusivity in all our community structures, spaces and interactions.

• We will empower community members to take collective action, provide spaces for the community to grow, and encourage different voices, perspectives and approaches.

• We will strive to recognise potential barriers to participation and work to avoid and overcome them in the structures we create.

5. Scaling Small

(Collaboratively networked with like-minded entities)

• We aim to bring people together who are interested in developing a shared vision for open access.

• By working together, we will scale small in order to enable equitable participation in the development of open access books.

• To enable open access book publishing we will design and build infrastructures of different types and scales that can be engaged with and adopted in a range of different levels by actors of different sizes and backgrounds, who share our vision.

6. Anti-competitive

(Opposed to the competitive practices that pit presses as well as other stakeholders in open publishing against one another in the pursuit of financial profit)

• By bringing like-minded entities together, we will nurture an anti-competitive ecosystem for open access book publishing.

7. Non-hierarchical

(Pro-horizontal relationships)

• Within the Copim community, we strive towards non-hierarchical or horizontal ways of working. We also want to promote these ways of working through our partnerships with stakeholders who are working within the same terrain to create open ecosystems.