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‘Community over commercialisation’: Thoughts from Team Copim

An introduction to a set of interviews with several of the Copim team, about their work and how it relates to this year's Open Access Week theme: 'Community over commercialisation'.

Published onOct 21, 2024
‘Community over commercialisation’: Thoughts from Team Copim
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Copim is an international community of people working in universities, publishers, libraries and infrastructure providers, who are building open, non-profit and community-led infrastructure to support open access book publishing. Since 2022, we have released Open Access Week interviews to share more about who we are and what we care about when it comes to open access books (here are the interviews from 2022 and 2023).

This year’s theme is ‘Community over commercialisation’, and it’s something we care about deeply. The Open Book Futures project team (currently the focus of Copim’s activity) is a community of people who are also members of different communities (our universities, our various places of work) and we are creating a broader community of presses, libraries and other infrastructures that we engage and support via the Open Book Collective, Thoth, Opening the Future, the Thoth Archiving Network and the Experimental Publishing projects we’re involved in. The guiding principle of Copim’s work has always been that these infrastructures should serve their communities first, foremost and always, and not be put in the service of making profit for shareholders.

In order to translate this principle into practice, we have worked hard to devise robust governance structures so that a community-led organisation like the Open Book Collective should be answerable in direct, practical ways to the libraries and presses that support and use it, while an infrastructure such as Thoth is founded as a Community Interest Company (CIC), a regulated non-profit that is obligated to serve a community purpose.

Copim has existed since 2019, and in the past half a decade–and particularly in the last year or two–we have noticed that the language of ‘community’ has begun to be used more and more. Sometimes this is thoughtful and meaningful, but at other times it is little more than a marketing slogan, an attempt to offer a vague signal that the initiative in question is well-meaning without any indication of whether or how this commitment–because it is a commitment–is carried out in practice. In response, we have begun to talk more explicitly and specifically about the ways in which our commitments to our communities are exemplified in practice, as well as calling attention to the dangers of ‘community-washing’. We are taking the opportunity offered by the Open Access Week theme of ‘Community over commercialisation’ to highlight this message on social media and to publish a blog post about what being community-led means to us.

We also share the following interviews with members of the Copim team, who offer their own thoughts on this topic: you can find them via the carousel at the top of this post.

We hope that this Open Access Week theme gives everyone the opportunity to reflect on why community matters, and how it is embedded in your own work and that of the people and organisations you collaborate with.

Photo by John Cameron on Unsplash

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