The Open Book Futures (OBF) project, funded by Arcadia and the Research England Development (RED) Fund, was launched in May 2023 and will run until April 2026. OBF is led by Lancaster University and builds upon the pioneering work of the COPIM project (2019–2023) to initiate a step-change in the ambition, scope and impact of community-led and owned open access book publishing. Open Book Futures follows the principles of ‘Scaling Small’ (Adema and Moore, 2021) 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 Experimental Publishing Compendium, a valuable guide, catalogue, and toolkit for scholars, publishers, developers, librarians and designers who want to challenge, push and redefine the shape, form and rationale of scholarly books. The Compendium presents a collection of tools, practices and experimental books to help and inspire authors and publishers to make experimental scholarly works.
The Experimental Publishing Compendium was developed and is currently maintained by Copim’s Experimental Publishing Group (Janneke Adema, Simon Bowie, Rebekka Kiesewetter, and Julien McHardy), which is researching ways to more closely align existing software, tools and technologies, workflows and infrastructures for experimental publishing with the workflows of open access book publishers.[1] The Group is currently working on expanding the Compendium, for instance by developing a governance model supported by the research conducted as part of this scoping report. The Group is also conducting experimental book pilots, working with publishers, authors and open source platform providers to foster and encourage practices of experimentation with and reuse of scholarly books. Three pilot projects were conducted as part of the COPIM project, and three more projects are currently being supported by the Experimental Publishing Group as part of the Open Book Futures project. All these pilot projects are accompanied by extensive documentation, which serves as a resource for the partners involved. The documentation also enables the sharing of knowledge with other presses and author communities on how to publish an experimental book, how to start experimenting with new formats and practices, and how to establish and maintain workflows for future experimental book publishing projects. Furthermore, the pilot projects and the documentation showcase the different open source tools and technologies that are available to realise and support experimental publishing workflows. Finally, this documentation will feed back into the research and resources the Experimental Publishing Group is creating, including the Compendium and other toolkits that Copim maintains.
Outline of the Experimental Publishing Compendium
The Experimental Publishing Compendium is the outcome of an extended and collaborative research process, which has culminated in a practical resource for the academic community to help authors, publishers and others involved in digital knowledge production to get started with experimental, multimodal, and practice-based book publishing projects, or to support their faculty or students in doing so. The linked entries in the Compendium inspire speculations on the future of the book (and the humanities in general) by encouraging publishers and authors to explore publications beyond the standard printed codex format.
As a resource and toolkit, the Compendium gathers tools, examples of experimental books, and experimental publishing practices with a focus on free and open source software, platforms and digital publishing tools that presses and authors can either use freely and/or further adapt to their own workflows. The tools, practices and books listed in the Compendium are linked together, showcasing the relationships between a book and its processes of production and publication. Users can scroll through the website both horizontally and vertically, offering several different routes through the Compendium and a more associative navigation. Each experimental book listed in the Compendium, for example, is connected to the tools used in its production or presentation and to the experimental publishing practices that it has utilised or embodies. Experimental publishing practices capture ways of interacting with and relating to open and experimental books and include practices such as collaborative writing, annotating, remixing, reviewing, translating and versioning. Each practice listed in the Compendium is accompanied by a short essay that situates how it relates to experimental publishing, highlighting examples of how the practice is or can be experimental and how it can support experimental publishing. The Compendium acts as a guide for both experienced practitioners and those just setting out to experiment with the forms, content and practices of scholarly bookmaking, and as such can offer an important resource for authors, publishers, librarians and others involved in knowledge production, providing up-to-date information about available experimental publishing resources, and the latest insights into how the scholarly communications system is changing and developing.
The Experimental Publishing Compendium was launched at the end of April 2023 in a beta release as one of the final deliverables of the COPIM project. Since then, the Experimental Publishing Group has further developed the Compendium by adding new practices (including translating, licensing, rewriting, designing and referencing), new tools and new experimental books, and we have finalised outstanding development and design elements. In December 2023, the Compendium was formally launched (and released out of beta) with a promotion campaign and a series of festive tweets and toots. Since then, a promotional walkthrough video of the Compendium has been released, the Compendium has been presented at various international talks and conferences[2] and it was nominated for the Digital Humanities Awards 2023 in the category ‘Best DH Tool or Suite of Tools’. The Experimental Publishing Group is currently hosting a series of online seminars called ‘Experimental Book Publishing in Practice’. The seminars will feature short walkthroughs of platforms and tools, as well as talks by and Q&As with the people that have developed, designed or are currently maintaining them. Alongside the tool presentations, authors or publishers that have used these tools to publish experimental books will be sharing their experiences.
Aims and Methodology
This scoping report sets out to do several things. Its overall aim is to scope an extended governance structure for the Experimental Publishing Compendium. Currently the Compendium is overseen, curated and maintained by Janneke Adema, Julien McHardy, and Simon Bowie, with back-end coding by Simon Bowie, front-end coding by Joel Galvez and design by Joel Galvez and Martina Vanini. One of the deliverables of the OBF project is the implementation of an extended governance structure for the Compendium, and this report will reflect on why this is needed and what the functions of such a model and structure would be. This report will also provide a comparison of governance models implemented and set up by similar toolkits and resources, be they more formal (in the form of governance models, boards, etc.) or more informal, including public descriptions of who is responsible for maintaining and updating the resource, who decides what is included, and how this is organised, etc. Based on this analysis, which will take up the first half of this report, the second half will propose a draft governance model for the Experimental Publishing Compendium. Both the analysis and the draft model will take into consideration the specific characteristics, functions and needs of the Compendium and the communities it serves. It will also take into consideration a selection of suggested future enhancements to the Compendium—which will be discussed in the final section of the report—and how these could be best achieved.
The Need for an Extended Governance Community
Why is there a need for an extended governance model and community for the Compendium? First of all, because the long-term availability of the current curatorial and maintenance team is not assured,[3] as this relies (partly) on OBF project funding buying out their time. Even if the current team does continue its work on a voluntary basis after the project ends in April 2026, it will most likely not be able to put in as much work and some of the design and development work is reliant on external funding. In addition to this, most similar toolkits (as our findings will show) become rapidly obsolete (and sometimes even non-functional) after project funding ends and/or are not regularly maintained. Setting up an extended governance model (and community) that also outlines a plan for further development and maintenance of the Compendium after the OBF project ends is crucial to the long-term resilience of the Compendium. Furthermore, it is not only the toolkits themselves, but also the resources they list that either become rapidly obsolete or are further developed (incorporating new features and functionalities, etc.), hence it is crucial that there is a regular review of the resources listed within the Compendium to ensure they are still up to date. Again, as our findings will show, toolkits that do remain openly available for an extended period of time often struggle with outdated information on their platforms and websites. Keeping all of this as up to date as possible is even more crucial in the context of experimental book publishing, a field that sees much more rapid changes and developments than traditional book publishing. The importance of developing more formalised governance structures that are truly community-led is also critical given how the lack of this kind of governance can result in anything from buy-outs of open infrastructures to substantial changes to them that challenge their openness or community focus (Hart et al., 2022; COPIM, 2022). Finally, an extended governance model and community for the Compendium is required as our work as part of the Experimental Publishing Group on the OBF project has shown that there is an urgent need for a resource such as the Compendium—which has received very positive feedback as part of our outreach activities. This need is evidenced by authors and publishers lack of knowledge and know-how about experimental book publishing, about the open source tools and platforms available to host and implement this and about how to set-up and support an experimental book publishing project.
Functions of a Governance Community
What would we need a governance community to do for the Compendium? What functions should it have? We will come back to this question in the second part of this report, but as a minimum requirement we require a community that will keep the Compendium up to date and curate what resources are included. In addition to that, and where feasible, we need a governance community to consider the future development needs of the Compendium, and how it can best support the publishing activities and experiments of the communities it serves. This includes consideration of the technical maintenance and software updates that might be required. A governance community can also function as a very valuable resource to promote and conduct outreach activities on behalf of the Compendium and the resources and practices included in it. The Compendium would also benefit from the experimental publishing expertise of a governance community in relation to their knowledge of both existing and potential new tools, practices and experimental book examples, which could be added to the Compendium. The governance community can also help make connections to other related projects as well as to communities the governance members are involved in, further extending the reach, relevance and impact of the Compendium.
In conclusion, where at a minimum we are aiming to set up a model and community that serves the Compendium on an internal level (curating and maintaining it), ideally we are hoping for a community that could also give it direction in a more outward-facing way, by exploring its future development needs and connections to related projects and communities.
Comparison of Toolkit Governance Models
How have other toolkits, resources, and guides in the wider (book) publishing landscape implemented their governance (and do they have a governance model at all?), how does this governance function, and what does it set out to do? In this next section we will look at a selection of similar toolkits and guides to explore what we can learn from their models and structures. The following information is based on desk research of secondary sources and information available on the websites of the tools and platforms discussed, and the communities and organisations that maintain them.
The Electronic Literature Directory (ELD) 2.0, as described on its website, is a collection of literary works, descriptions, and keywords. The Directory seeks to identify and describe works of electronic literature and functions both as a repository of works and a critical companion to e-literature. It was designed to bring authors and readers of e-literature together and to provide artists, authors, readers, educators, and casual readers greater access to the growing body of works known as electronic literature. The ELD includes a repository of descriptions of hypertext works that are crowd sourced. Anyone can make an account on the ELD platform and submit 300–500 word entries to the Directory on current e-lit works both within and outside of academia, which are subsequently peer-reviewed and posted on the ELD. The ELD also hosts a list of resources and a crowd-sourced glossary of e-literary terms.
Governance
The ELD has existed since 2010 and is a project that sits under the Electronic Literature Organization, an international organisation dedicated to the investigation of literature produced for the digital medium, founded in Chicago in 1999. The ELO itself is made up of The Consortium of Electronic Literature (CEL), a group of institutions and organisations that supports the ELO and with that the ELD. As described on the ELD website, a representative from each affiliated organisation has been appointed to the Electronic Literature Directory Working Group, founded by the literary scholar and theorist Joseph Tabbi (University of Illinois at Chicago) and conducted by the editorial board of electronic book review (www.electronicbookreview.com).
The ELD consists of project directors alongside a managing editor and a group of associate editors, as well as people responsible for design and implementation. In addition, there is the ELD Working Group. All these people are listed prominently on the Directory’s About page (including previous editors) as are the ELO Fellows that have previously contributed to the ELD. The ELD has clear guidelines on how entries can be submitted, what criteria they need to fulfil, and how they will be reviewed.[4] They also have a code of conduct. Work on the Directory has previously been supported by grants, including a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, but seems to rely predominantly on volunteer labour. They do also have a competitive Fellowship model, which, when awarded, includes ELO membership and a stipend in exchange for work on ELO projects (including adding entries to the ELD). Once approved by the ELD’s board of editors, entries will be added to the ELD.
· Finding the Right Platform. A Crosswalk of Academy-Owned and Open-Source Digital Publishing Platforms - Corinne Guimont, Matt Vaughn, and Cheryl E. Ball: https://doi.org/10.17613/hgty7-sy093
Finding the Right Platform is a 34-page, hyperlinked crosswalk that includes at-a-glance feature comparisons for 10 academy-owned and open source publishing platforms (Fulcrum, Humanities Commons, Janeway, Manifold, Mukurtu, Omeka, Open Journal Systems, Pressbooks, PubPub and Scalar) commonly used in library and university press publishing, which has been published under a CC BY license on Humanities Commons. The crosswalk developed out of an NEH panel on The Futures of Digital Scholarship, held in May 2022 and an autumn 2022 Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) community call on non-traditional publications, and the crosswalk was developed during the LPC’s Documentation Month in February 2023 by librarians Corinne Guimont (LPC Member from Virginia Tech), Matt Vaughn (LPC Member from Indiana University), and independent publishing consultant Cheryl E. Ball (LPC Strategic Affiliate through the Council of Editors of Learned Journals). Its goal is to help librarians, publishers, and authors/researchers make a decision to further pursue one platform over another (or to identify and further research a smaller group of platforms that might be suitable for their projects). The crosswalk begins by asking users what type of project they want to publish and what features they are looking for in publishing platforms and provides one-pagers that give a more detailed description of the individual project and what it excels at and compares each of the relevant platforms across the following features: Hosting & Cost; Ingestion Options; Editorial Workflows; Interactivity; Archive & Preservation; Export Options; Discoverability; and Accessibility. The crosswalk is complimented by an article in the International Journal of Librarianship (special issue on Scholarly Communication, co-edited by Charlotte Roh) that outlines the methods behind the project, what documentation and criteria they looked at, how they decided to design the crosswalk, outcomes of user-testing, how and where they decided to release the documentation in collaboration with other entities, and what future plans may be in store for adding additional platforms to this CC BY licensed project. They mention that they look forward to feedback from the LPC and scholarly communications communities, but they also mention that they hope that others might take up the task of continuing to add to, revise, and refine this crosswalk as more platforms, documentation and features become available to library publishing, which seems to indicate they won’t be actively updating the crosswalk.
The Institute of Network Cultures is a research group at the faculty of Digital Media and Creative Industries at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences that was founded in 2004 by Geert Lovink and focuses on the establishment of sustainable research networks on online culture. It has been involved in contemporary (cultural) publishing experiments for years and it has over the last two decades kept several lists of tools for publishing. From 2013 to 2014, they developed the Hybrid Publishing Toolkit: a workflow for simultaneously publishing books as print-on-demand, PDF, and ePub, which has since been used for the Theory on Demand book series of hybrid publication. The toolkit was created by the Digital Publishing Toolkit Collective (Marc de Bruijn, Liz Castro, Florian Cramer, Joost Kircz, Silvio Lorusso, Michael Murtaugh, Pia Pol, Miriam Rasch and Margreet Riphagen) and provides hands-on practical advice and tools, focusing on working solutions for low-budget, small-edition publishing. It includes a glossary and a catalogue of free and open source software, with links to the relevant sources. More recently Going Hybrid (2021-2023) was a 24-month-long research project into the future of hybridity in the cultural field supported by a RAAK-Mkb grant from the Taskforce for Applied Research SIA and conducted by the Institute of Network Cultures, in collaboration with The Hmm, MU, Varia, Hackers & Designers, IMPAKT, Framer Framed, and Willem de Kooning Academie (Hogeschool Rotterdam). The Relevant Tools & Practices in Hybrid Publishing list was created by the Hybrid Publications Research Group and published as a blogpost in 2022. It is unclear whether it has been updated since.
Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) write on their website that they created the Infra Finder, supported by funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to serve as a free, one-stop discovery and evaluation tool for users to find open infrastructure services that may suit their needs. Their focus seems to be mostly on being a trusted source of information and key reference for institutions to support open research and scholarship. What sets them apart from many of the other toolkits and resources is that they work closely with infrastructure service providers to keep Infra Finder up to date, and information on the platform is volunteered by participating open infrastructure services providers. In addition to that IOI have set up a verification method where submitted data is reviewed by the IOI team against publicly available information, although they also write in their user terms of agreement statement that they ‘cannot and do not guarantee the validity or accuracy of any information presented in the Infra Finder tool’. They further allow users to compare infrastructures and tools with a comparison tool. IOI provide extensive documentation to Infra Finder on HackMD and have a FAQ on their website. They provide several options for users to provide feedback (both for infrastructure providers and those using Infra Finder to find an infrastructure). The data in Infra Finder is based on IOI’s pilot project Catalog of Open Infrastructure Services and built on previous and current efforts, including SComCat and other resources. They list clear eligibility criteria for providers that want their infrastructure listed on the platform, including whether it meets the definition of open source software, is in active use as a service, protocol, standard or software that the academic ecosystem needs in order to perform its functions throughout the research lifecycle, distributes OA content, is free to use, is community-governed and transparent in operations and finances and is operated by a non-profit or non-commercial entity. IOI originally invited 84 services to participate but providers can also put their resource forward to be included. It is possible to download Infra Finders data as a .csv file.
Governance
Infra Finder is hosted and maintained by IOI, and, according to their documentation, made possible in collaboration with the service providers, Cast Iron Coding, and their community. They have a list of contributors and their role in maintaining Infra Finder on their website. They offer various options for users to support Infra Finder. Updating seems to be the responsibility of the existing providers on the admin end of their platform and any update will go through their verification process. They regularly write to providers to update their information. New service providers are asked to complete an Expression of Interest form. They follow IOI’s Code of Conduct.
The Jisc NUP toolkit is a free-to-access resource published under a CC BY licence that supports and gives guidance to NUPs and library-led publishing ventures and those who are planning to launch or investigate whether to establish a press. The toolkit was published on 24 March 2021 and is independent and interdisciplinary with articles written in English. It is initially aimed at UK institutions but will draw on international best practice and case studies and will appeal to a global audience. The toolkit has its roots in the 2017 Jisc Landscape Report On New University Presses (NUPs) And Academic-Led Publishing, which found that many of these presses were operating with a low number of staff and wanted advice and guidance on governance, licensing, financial best practice, peer review, distribution, statistics, preservation and marketing.
The toolkit is governed by an editorial advisory board consisting of experts in open access publishing in the UK and mainland Europe who wrote the toolkit. The board meets regularly to review new content or commission new work based on community feedback to enable continuous updates and ensure quality. Support from other UK experts and presses who have contributed to sections of the toolkit is also listed. Jisc further supports the toolkit by providing the services of a digital content editor helping with copy editing, refining and building the toolkit. There is no revision history for the toolkit, so it is unclear whether it is still actively maintained and/or updated.
The Library Publishing Toolkit is a project funded partially by Bibliographic Databases and Interlibrary Resources Sharing Program funds which are administered and supported by the Rochester Regional Library Council. The toolkit is a united effort between Milne Library at SUNY Geneseo and the Monroe County Library System. It aims to identify trends in library publishing, seek out best practices to implement, and share the best tools and resources. The Library Publishing Toolkit consists of a report that was published in 2013 in a first edition under a CC BY-SA licence, aiming to be the first of many shared resources dedicated to library publishing services. The report looks at the broad and varied landscape of library publishing through discussions, case studies and shared resources and has been edited by researcher and editor Alison Brown, with sections of the report written by different authors and/or based on interviews and tours. The report asks readers to ‘share your thoughts, strategies, and workflows by adding your comments and suggestions to http://www.publishingtoolkit.org/’, but it is unclear how they can or could do so. It doesn’t look like the report has been updated since 2013.
The Mind the Gap Catalogue is a report and catalogue compiled and authored by John Maxwell together with a team at the Canadian Institute for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University. The catalogue was published in July 2019 as the outcome of a commissioned environmental scan by the MIT Press who received a grant in 2018 from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation to conduct a comprehensive and critical landscape analysis of open source publishing systems in active use, to showcase the durable alternatives to complex and costly proprietary services. The report, which outlines the wider ecosystem in which these tools and projects exist (structured around themes such as sustainability, scale, collaboration and ecosystem integration), isaccompanied by acatalogue of individual open source publishing tools and platforms providing a short description that explains what the open source project is and does, followed by basic information on the host organisation, the project's principal investigator or leadership, funders, partners (both strategic and development), date of original release, current version and info about its lifespan so far. They also include some basic data drawn from the Github/Gitlab repositories for these projects, including development language, license, number of contributors. The aim of the catalogue is to provide university press community and other mission-focused enterprises an overview of the open source landscape and projects individually in order to aid institutions' and individuals' decision-making and project planning and help publishers develop or find robust, cost-beneficial alternatives to commercially obtainable services and systems. The final report and catalogue were published on PubPub with an invitation to readers to share their comments on the findings and recommendations. The last release of the catalogue was 5 years ago, and the comments do not seem to be integrated into a new version.
Monoskop is an independent web-based educational resource and research platform for arts, culture and humanities, founded in 2004 and maintained by researcher, artist, and cultural activist Dušan Barok. Monoskop is one of the largest shadow libraries of free avant-garde materials on the web, featuring an indexed collection of information and materials on arts, media, software and theory. It links wiki pages run on MediaWiki software with multilingual genealogical bibliographies of contemporary themes and movements in art, culture, and society—including a sub-archive on artists' publishing. Many of the titles in the bibliographies are linked to electronic versions of publications on Monoskop or other free/libre libraries, which they make available under the fair use doctrine which permits only personal, educational and scholarly use. Monoskop has a track record of documenting and archiving its own development and transformations on its ‘about’ page and it also tracks and publishes its statistics. As Monoskop is a wiki, anyone can edit any article and have those changes posted immediately after registering to become a user. In 2024, Monoskop had more than 6700 registered users and contributors, including a dozen or so active users (having added content in the last 30 days). Monoskop maintains the parallel project “Monoskop Log”, which releases digital publications linked to the wiki entries. Books are available in different formats and their digitisation is done by Monoskop. Changes made on the Monoskop website are all logged and various archives and backups of Monoskop content are kept (on the Internet Archive).
As its website states, the OA Books Toolkit, first launched in 2020, is a free-to-access public resource aimed at promoting and supporting open access (OA) to academic books and consists of 45 short articles covering a wide range of topics relating to OA books, each including a list of sources referenced, further reading and links to definitions of key terms. The toolkit has two main sections. One section addresses authors of academic books and is intended to help authors to better understand OA book publishing and to increase trust in OA books. The other section is aimed at policy makers and provides a resource to support policy development for OA books. Taken together, the articles should also be of interest to the wider range of stakeholders with an interest in OA books publishing and policy, for example libraries and publishers. The toolkit also includes a Glossary of Terms.
Governance
The Open Access Books Toolkit is a global and multi-stakeholder initiative that is hosted by the OAPEN organisation and is updated on a regular basis by an independent board and an Editorial Advisory Board and content has been put together by both the Board and other individuals on a voluntary basis. More recently the toolkit was redeveloped, extended, and relaunched as part of the PALOMERA project, set up to improve policy alignment for OA to academic books in the European Research Area (ERA), to include a new section for Policy makers. They invite contributions from stakeholders to support the Toolkit to cover the costs of maintenance and further development and they have previously received support from the University of Glasgow, the University of York, Utrecht University and Springer Nature. The Board is involved in the development and maintenance of the toolkit, including providing editorial support, which includes identifying new resources, suggesting changes and maintaining regular update cycles. Each toolkit article includes a ‘Revised’ stamp that indicates the last time the article was updated. The Board has a Chair and a main point of contact.
The Toolkit for Small and Scholar-Led Open Access Publishers is a resource to help publishers set up a press or improve the way they operate. The toolkit was published in May 2023 and is maintained by the Open Book Collective as part of the COPIM project. As a guide of guides it compiles key insights from other toolkits, reports and resources produced in recent years relevant to smaller and academic-led open access publishers, supplementing existing resources with further information, as well as advice about where to prioritise. The toolkit is open for contributions or suggestions from the wider public, and they have set up a hypothes.is group where people can leave comments directly on the texts in the toolkit by marking up specific sections. Revisions made to the toolkit are publicly visible, but the toolkit hasn’t been updated anymore since the last revision a year ago.
The Open Access Directory (OAD), is a wiki where the open access (OA) community can create and support simple factual lists (i.e. it does not include articles, narratives, opinions or graphics) about open access to science and scholarship, which was co-founded and launched by Peter Suber and Robin Peek on April 30, 2008. It includes a listing on free and open source journal management software. The School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) at Simmons University (formerly Simmons College) hosts the OAD, yet responsibility for the OAD content and editorial policy lies with the OAD editorial board, not with the School of Library and Information Science. The OAD is a crowd-sourced volunteer project and depends on the community to keep its lists accurate and comprehensive, hence its portal states that its goal is for the OA community itself to enlarge and correct the lists with little intervention from the editors or editorial board, yet for quality control, they limit editing privileges to registered users (creating an account is free and steps are clearly outlined). The OAD does clearly outlines its editorial policy and it has a comprehensive list of editors and administrators, members of its Editorial Board, and alumni. It has a page that lists recent changes, which shows it is still regularly updated, but the listing on free and open source journal management software hasn’t been updated since 2018.
· OPERAS Tools and Platforms SIG
The Special Interest Group (SIG) ‘Tools and Platforms’ is part of OPERAS, the Research Infrastructure supporting open scholarly communication in the HSS in the European Research Area. This SIG, developed from a working group dedicated to tools for scholarly publishing in the HSS, was set up in 2017 and focuses on emerging practices and needs concerning open scholarly communication tools and services enabling the main publishing activities. The main objectives of the SIG are to provide guidance in front of a complex evolving context, to examine how tools and platforms development could benefit open scholarly communication in HSS. The SIG has authored a couple of White Papers (in 2018 and 2021)—which can be annotated with Pundit—which function as a technical watch, listing the main tools and platforms that could be used for open scholarly communication, and identifying the more important trends in this area. The White Papers also provide a provisional list of criteria that a user could rely upon to select the most appropriate tool for its purpose. They also provide recommendations that support the building of an open scholarly communication infrastructure, which include: to establish user-centric criteria for tools, a tools’ observatory, a set of training materials, guidelines about publishing workflows and collaborations with other community initiatives. The SIG has also been working on establishing an analytical tools catalogue, information cards and orientation tools based on main publishing workflows. They developed a Tools Schema spreadsheet (SIG Tools and platforms draft wiki) which seems to be based on SComCat data.
Governance
On the SIG page on the OPERAS website contact points are listed as are the names and bios of SIG coordinators and members. The SIG maintenance activities consist of: keeping a technical watch on reports, developments, and trends; maintaining a list of relevant tools, detailing features and functionalities; and developing common approach and criteria for choosing tools.
The Post-Digital Publishing Archive (P—DPA) is a project and resource set-up by Italian artist, designer and researcher Silvio Lorusso, who since 2013 has been documenting experimental publishing informed by digital technology. The aim of P—DPA, as the project’s ‘about’ page states, is to systematically collect, organise and keep trace of experiences in the fields of art and design (which are often a hybrid of print and digital) that explore the relationships between publishing and digital technology. The projects and works included in the P—DPA actively question, highlight or reframe constitutive aspects of publishing in the post-digital age. The archive acts as a space in which the collected projects are confronted and juxtaposed in order to highlight relevant paths, mutual themes, common perspectives, interrelations, but also oppositions and idiosyncrasies. The archive juxtaposes, categorises and compares according to several categories, namely authors, works, media, technologies, platforms and keywords. P—DPA is maintained by Silvio Lorusso and lists Juliette Pépin as a second archivist. The works that are included in P—DPA are listed with their upload dates and—although the website explains that the P-DPA is a side project—the latest work added was added on February 15th, 2024, so it is still semi-regularly updated. P-DPA is partly user-generated as it is possible to suggest a work and/or article for inclusion and the website clearly outlines criteria for inclusion. Comments, suggestions, ideas, criticisms are also welcome and the P—DPA website lists Lorusso’s contact details to get in touch to provide these. The project states on its website that it has been kindly supported by Iuav University of Venice, and the Variable F/LOSS Arts Lab and also lists the PublishingLab as a partner. The website code and its data are available as a repository on GitHub.
The Radical Open Access Collective, formed in 2015, is a community of scholar-led, not-for-profit presses, journals and other open access projects. Now consisting of more than 80 members, it promotes a progressive vision for open publishing in the humanities and social sciences. It set up an information and resources portal for open access and scholarly-led publishing initiatives in HSS on its website, which it states, ‘will be a community-driven information platform and will be based on the sharing of skills and information that is already available within the Radical Open Access community.’ The information portal, which is set up as a wiki, includes information on Funding and Publication Opportunities for Open Access Books; OA Publishing Tools; Diversity, Ethics, Publishing Standards; Collaborative Marketing and Events; and Radical Open Access Literature. The list on OA Publishing Tools contains a list of open source tools, software, and platforms for scholar-led approaches to open access. It states that this list is not exhaustive and has last been updated May 2019. It offers opportunities for users to edit this page directly to add tools or users can send suggestions to the maintainers of the information portal, Janneke Adema and Samuel Moore. The Information Portal also lists various other resources the community can use, including SComCat, the Mind the Gap report, and several resources maintained by the Copim community.
· Scholarly Communication Technology Catalogue (SComCat)
The Scholarly Communication Technology Catalogue (SComCat) was a catalogue and knowledge base of scholarly communications open technologies including software and some essential running services that was released in 2021. It provided concise descriptions of open source scholarly communication tools or services and compared and contrasted these based on features like their organisation model, standards, level of adoption, or dependencies. Created by Antleaf, COAR, and the Next Generation Library Publishing project, SComCat’s purpose was to assist potential users in making decisions about which technologies they will adopt. The scan includes tools, platforms, and standards that can be locally adopted to support the functions of the lifecycle of scholarly communication, including creation, evaluation, publication, dissemination, preservation, and reuse. The initial data has been drawn from existing sources, including the Mind The Gap report (SFU, MIT). The data is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License and the SComCat software is built as open source software, licensed under an MIT License. The public-facing website seems to have only been available for a couple of years, but the GitHub repository is still there. Although it is no longer under active development or maintenance, you can still reuse the code and data subject to the respective licenses. Antleaf (working for COAR) was responsible for development and maintainance of SComCat, which was built on the Ruby on Rails platform, and originally incorporated a faceted browsing interface, editorial control and machine-readable interfaces to all the data collected in the system. There was originally also a feedback form located on the SComCat Contribute page.
Findings
What becomes clear when analysing these 15 toolkits, guides and catalogues, is that there exists a big distinction between resources that have been created out of projects as project deliverables (e.g., Library Publishing Toolkit, SComCat, Mind the Gap, Finding the Right Platform), which tend to take the form of static reports or webpages that are not actively maintained after project end, and resources that have been initiated by organisations that either oversee them or that provide resources—mostly in the form of server space and volunteer labour—to maintain them (e.g., the ELD, OA Books Toolkit, IOI Infra Finder). What is interesting here is that a parent organisation, alongside providing maintenance support, can also provide credibility to a resource or toolkit, ranging from editorial oversight to establishing connections to a wider community, which can be drawn upon for peer review support and quality control. Having a more formal entity connected to a resource can in some instances also help keep the governance of a resource more ‘lean’, as there are opportunities to draw on the wider governance of the parent organisation (e.g., the ELD, OPERAS Tools and Platform SIG, IOI Infra Finder). However, some resources emphasise that they (e.g., an editor or editorial collective) retain autonomy and editorial control over the resource that sits under a parent organisation (e.g., OA Books Toolkit). Nevertheless, having some form of institutional affiliation does seem to contribute to a resource’s resilience.
Furthermore, and connected to this, in most cases the governance (in relation to who decides what is included, who maintains the resource etc.) of these resources is quite informal (sometimes even non-existent it seems) and is often not publicly outlined in detail. What we see in most cases is an editor or group of active editors which are further supported by either an advisory board or a wider community that contributes crowd-sourced contributions. Some of the most long-running resources (e.g., the OAD, Monoskop, P—DPA) are maintained by a dedicated editor or small group of editors, driven by strong individual interest and a community of interested contributors or supporters (e.g., Monoskop, the ELD, the OAD, P—DPA).
If we look at the resources themselves, what can be observed is that most of the ones that we looked at are set up in a rather straightforward way and consist of either research reports accompanied by catalogues or lists of tools on webpages or in blogposts, or simple wikis (e.g., the OAD, Mind the Gap, ROAC Information Portal, INC Hybrid Publishing Toolkits). Yet there are also several resources that are set up in a more elaborate way, on separate websites or platforms, and which can be quite interactive, for example juxtaposing tools and/or providing comparison tools and elaborate search options (e.g., IOI Infra Finder, the Experimental Publishing Compendium itself).
What is interesting to note in addition to this is that toolkits and resources have often been built upon or have consulted each other’s data. Many of the resources surveyed make their underlying data openly available, by using open licensing or by maintaining open and downloadable data repositories on for example GitHub or archived versions of the resource on the Internet Archive (e.g., Monoskop, SComCat, P—DPA). There is also a good level of acknowledgement of the previous resources that a toolkit or guide has either consulted, built their data upon, re-used, or cross-checked for more recent updates (e.g., SComCat drew on the data from the Mind the Gap report, which again drew on several older resources, including the ROAC Information Portal). Not only does this practice of open data sharing, re-use, and acknowledgement reduce and distribute the labour involved in maintaining these kinds of resources (which often rely on volunteer and crowd-sourced labour), it is also a good example of the scaling small principle (Adema and Moore, 2021) in action, where these resources are not in competition with each other nor have they been set up for financial gain. This prolific re-use of open resources also provides an interesting counterpoint to the argument we made earlier in the introduction to this report, namely that many of these resources or the data they rely upon rapidly become obsolete after they have been published. The fact that the underlying data they are built upon is frequently, if not in most cases, openly shared, and often remains openly available after a resource is no longer actively maintained or even loses its web domain (e.g., SComCat), showcases the resilience of these kinds of open toolkits, whether community, scholar-, or organisational-led.[5]
Some further observations include that there is an interesting distinction between those resources that are set up with full editorial control (maintained and controlled by an editor or group of editors) and those that are open for (some form of) community input. The latter tend to come in two forms, either they operate as a wiki, where people can freely add content that immediately is added to the front end, often with little editorial control (e.g., Monoskop, the OAD, the ROAC Information Portal), or they encourage community input or control but maintain more stringent quality or editorial control guidelines (e.g., IOI Infra Finder, the ELD). This could involve having a written-up editorial policy about the type of content that can be added, and/or checking the content after an author sends it to a contact address or has set up an account to add the content to the resource more directly. There are also resources that allow a kind of mixture of both, by using annotation layers that allow users to add comments, updates, or add suggestions, which often remain visible on the resource or report (e.g., Mind the Gap, OBC Toolkit, OPERAS Tools and Platforms SIG).
It is not always clear from each of the resources who has added to a particular entry, nor is it always clear when it was (last) updated, which depends on whether this information has been added to the specific entry or to the resource as a whole. In almost all cases though, either the editor(s) of the resource add the required content about the tools or cases included in the resource, or this is added by the community. The IOI Infra Finder works differently as it requires the tool or platform providers that are included to add information about the tool or platform themselves and keep this updated (which is then checked by the IOI Infra Finder editors). An extra incentive for tool and platform providers to do so is of course that IOI is also a funder, giving resources that (partly) rely on IOI funding or hope to receive this in the future, an extra incentive to add information to Infra Finder and keep this updated. This also makes IOI Infra Finder a great resource for other resources to cross-check against, as it includes knowledge provided by the tool and platform providers themselves.
Finally, what becomes clear is that, whether they are more straightforward or more interactive, maintained by a small group of people or by a larger community, a lot of labour goes into these resources and making sure they remain up to date. Clearly established governance, (transparent) editorial and quality guidelines and a maintenance plan can help contribute to this, but it does not replace what Maxwell et al. have highlighted as the importance of care, or ensuring that there is someone or a group of people who care enough to keep a resource alive long-term: ‘beyond the inner circle of active agency... who else will care enough to fund, contribute, promote, use, and ultimately further the useful life of these projects?’ (Maxwell et al., 2019). Enthusiasm and energy can eventually wane, as they state, which is an important argument for making sure that community practices are involved in maintaining resources or infrastructures, and ensuring they tie in with other resources in a larger interoperable context, which together can be mobilised to serve larger shared goals (e.g., towards openness or the promotion of experimental publishing practices).
Sketch for a Governance Model
Taking into consideration the above findings we will next sketch out a draft governance model for the Experimental Publishing Compendium (which we hope to fully bring into practice and finalise once we have a new governance community in place, as per our suggestions underneath). It takes into consideration the specific needs we feel the Compendium has, and serves its proposed further development and maintenance best.
Governance Community
Currently the Compendium is maintained by its editors (Janneke Adema, Simon Bowie, and Julien McHardy), with further input from current and former members of the Experimental Publishing Group and the Copim community. Ideally, we would like to extend the direct, active editorial group, by adding two more members, including one with the technical knowledge to assess and classify open source projects (currently Simon Bowie is the only one with this knowledge).
The editors (to be rebranded the Editorial Oversight Group (EOG)) would fulfil the following functions:
- Consists of a maximum of 5 people
- Meets on a quarterly basis to discuss the Compendium’s development needs
- Keeps the Compendium updated according to its Editorial Policy, which includes adding new tools, practices and/or books and checking whether existing ones are still up to date and/or relevant
- Processes any community feedback received
- Explores future development needs of the Compendium
- Meets with and present updates to the Compendium Advisory Community at least once a year
- Provides presentations and conducts outreach activities for the Compendium where so required
- Will commit to this Group for a minimum of 2 years
- Puts forward suggestions for and decides who will be part of the Compendium Advisory Community
The Compendium Advisory Community would fulfil the following functions:
- Consists of a maximum of 8 people
- Meets with the Editorial Oversight Group on a yearly basis (at minimum)
- Contributes their knowledge about experimental publishing practices, tools and books to the EOG where relevant and or requested
- Explores future development needs of the Compendium
- Provides presentations and conducts outreach activities for the Compendium where so required
- Can rotate into the Editorial Oversight Group where so required and appropriate
- Commits to this Community for a minimum of 2 years
- Puts forward suggestions for new members of the Compendium Advisory Community
We suggest that the EOG develop the following materials:
- Longlist of people to invite to become part of the Compendium Editorial Oversight Group
- Terms of engagement for Advisory Community, including a rotating mechanism (to be further decided upon with the Advisory Community)
Editorial Policy
The Experimental Publishing Compendium is a specialist resource, which foregrounds a specific vision of what experimental publishing is and what experimental books are, and of the kind of open source and community-led tools and resources we would like to include in the Compendium. It would therefore be helpful for any future governance community member, as well as people who want to contribute content to Compendium, to have a better idea of the kind of content and entries that we would like to include in the Compendium. To do so it would be helpful if the current editors of the Compendium developed a clearer editorial policy, both for the editors themselves to help them efficiently maintain the Compendium and for the wider community wanting to contribute to it. This would include a clear indication of what kind of open source tools and platforms are currently included on the platform, as well as the kind of experimental books that are featured on the Compendium, and why we chose to include these specifically. Even though, given the nature of experimental publishing, it will be hard to exactly indicate what we would want to include in the future (which will also partly depend on editorial discretion and expertise) this will ensure that the community is better informed about what the Compendium includes and needs. Where it makes sense for the list of tools and platforms to be as complete as possible (as it has the potential to be at the same time more or less exhaustive and manageable from on editorial perspective), it also makes sense to be more prescriptive in relation to the kind of experimental books we would like to include to showcase a specific tool or practice, given the large number of experimental books being published (especially in certain experimental categories, e.g., open peer review). Similarly, the Editorial Oversight Group will want to keep more control over the kind of practices that are featured on the Compendium and who is involved in authoring these, given the expertise required to do so. A more transparent Editorial Policy can further help explain, contextualise and support this and can make use of some of the earlier tools and guidelines developed by the Copim governance community to structure decision-making, e.g. by making use of both consensus decision-making and voting (Hart et al., 2022).
We suggest that the EOG develop the following:
- An Editorial Policy for the Compendium
Maintenance Procedures
In this Editorial Policy, it would be helpful to include different maintenance procedures (including the minimum requirement we previously indicated to keep the Compendium alive) that outline how often the Compendium should be updated or new material added, and who is responsible for maintaining what aspects of the Compendium. It could also be helpful to indicate which resources would be the most suitable to cross-check the Compendium’s data and entries against. Technical and server maintenance also need to be factored into this, as well as any outreach activities that might need to be conducted. A tiering of which activities are deemed most essential might also be developed.
Community Feedback and Input
The current editors of the Compendium have previously indicated that they would be interested in having some form of upload portal added to the Compendium. Not only would this relieve some of the labour that currently falls on Simon Bowie (who manually adds all new content to the Compendium currently) it would also allow the other editors to upload new content directly. Furthermore, it could allow the wider Compendium community, or those interested in experimental book publishing, to make suggestions for practices, books and tools to be added to the Compendium. This would need to incorporate a quality check mechanism to ensure content abides by the Compendium’s Editorial Policy.
We suggest that the EOG develop the following:
- An upload portal for editors to more easily and directly add content, community contributions and feedback. It is suggested to work with the Compendium’s previous developers to build this
- An Editorial Policy for the Compendium (see above)
Quality Control
In relation to the above, to ensure community (as well as editorial!) input is checked against the aims and editorial policy of the Compendium, a system to assess quality and check any input (i.e., suggestions for updates to or new tools or books to be added, essays on practices written by the community) needs to be developed. This could include input from the Advisory Community where their expertise overlaps. It might also be helpful to develop assessment mechanisms for crowd-sourcing events or workshops, where we would want to add new data to the Compendium more rapidly and hence assess it in a more ad-hoc manner. Given the findings from the resources analysed in this report, it makes sense for the Compendium’s editors to retain autonomy over these assessments, but that doesn’t mean they cannot draw on the Advisory Community and the wider Open Book Collective and Copim community where needed.
We suggest that the EOG develop the following:
- An Editorial Policy for the Compendium (see above)
Connection to the Open Book Collective (OBC)
As the findings of our analysis of resources similar to the Compendium indicate, a resource such as the Compendium could benefit from sitting under or being allied to a larger parent organisation, to give it credibility, visibility and stability while maintaining autonomy. Given the shared development history of the OBC and the Compendium, and their shared values, it makes sense for the Compendium to be positioned as a service of or resource aligned to the OBC, who are committed to bilbiodiversity and the promotion of more diverse and experimental book formats. The OBC is also itself a funder, which might potentially act as stimulus for tool providers and publishers to contribute information to the Compendium. Many of the examples of experimental books included in the Compendium are also drawn from the catalogues of OBC members, so there is already a clear connection between the Compendium and the OBC’s members, and the Compendium can also serve as a resource for those OBC members interested in exploring the publication of more experimental book forms or publishing workflows.
We suggest that the EOG develop the following:
- A white paper or concept note to present to the OBC Board of Custodians
Outline of Future Compendium Development Needs
Having outlined a first draft governance model for the Compendium in the above, as well as the policies, guidelines and terms that need to be further developed to implement this (to be ratified and further flashed out together with the future governance community), we wanted to also outline some of the future needs the Experimental Publishing Compendium could fulfil for its community, which would feed into an assessment of the amount of labour that might be needed now and in the future to develop these, and what to prioritise. Some of these development needs have been previously discussed by the editors when initially developing the Compendium, which for various reasons where not feasible at that point, but might be interesting to further look into now. This includes a way to better include the book typologies that were developed as part of the Books Contain Multitudes research report (Adema et al., 2022), an easy-to-use content upload portal for editors and users, and, where this is deemed feasible and manageable, a list of publishers that have previously been open to forms of experimental publishing or are currently happy to receive expressions of interest for experimental book projects. Given the importance of design to experimental publishing, we also previously discussed how we could foreground this more, or resources and/or information related to this.
But it also includes further resources that would complement the Compendium. One piece of feedback we received from users is that currently, even though the Compendium lists many tools and platforms, publishers and authors are unsure how to get started with these or which one to choose that best fits their experimental publishing project. For this reason we are currently hosting the Experimental Publishing Compendium in Practice seminar series, as part of which we are recording how-to talks with platform and tools providers and publishers or authors that will be added to the Compendium. Similarly, we also want to explore how we can better integrate the findings and workflows of the experimental book publishing pilot projects that we have previously conducted as part of the COPIM project and that we are currently conducting under the auspices of the Open Book Futures project, with the Compendium. This includes guidelines, indicative workflows and best or better practices for experimental book publishers, while at the same time remaining aware that we are not ‘too stringently fixing-down (…) the speculative character of these experiments’ (Adema et al., 2022).
Future development needs might also include a restructuring of how we are currently describing and presenting the tools, practices and examples of experimental books on the platform, and whether the categories and indicators that we are currently using are still fit for purpose and/or whether we would need to add additional ones. This could also include a discussion of whether it makes sense to translate (sections of) the Compendium in different languages/and or ensure the platform and website abide to or continues to abide to accessibility standards. But it could also include a focus on technological (backend) and design restructuring, to ensure this is still fit for purpose and works as it should.
Conclusion
In this scoping report we have developed a sketch for a governance model for the Experimental Publishing Compendium. This sketch has been based on an assessment of the governance models of existing scholarly communication toolkits and resources and any specific needs that the Compendium and the experimental publishing community might have. As part of this sketch, we have also indicated next steps and ways forward to further extend and formalise the existing governance of the Compendium and operationalise and implement the proposed new governance model. Finally, we have suggested that the process of adopting a new governance model is finalised in collaboration with the future extended Experimental Publishing Compendium governance community (consisting of the Editorial Oversight Group and the Compendium Advisory Community). We have suggested this in specific to highlight the importance of ‘revisiting, assessing, maintaining, and revising governance structures and procedures [as being] key to the enduring success of any project’ (Hart et al., 2022).
References
Adema, J., Bowie, S., Mars, M., and T. Steiner (2022). Books Contain Multitudes: Exploring Experimental Publishing (2022 update). Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). doi: 10.21428/785a6451.1792b84f & 10.5281/zenodo.6545475.
Adema, J., & Moore, S. A. (2018). Collectivity and collaboration: Imagining new forms of communality to create resilience in scholar-led publishing. Insights, 31(0), 3. https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.399
Adema, J., & Moore, S. A. (2021). Scaling Small; Or How to Envision New Relationalities for Knowledge Production. Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 16(1). https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.918
Hart, P., Adema, J., and COPIM. 2022. Towards Better Practices for the Community Governance of Open Infrastructures. Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). doi: 10.21428/785a6451.34150ea2 & 10.5281/zenodo.6535460
Maxwell, J. W., Hanson, E., Desai, L., Tiampo, C., O’Donnell, K., Ketheeswaran, A., Sun, M., Walter, E., & Michelle, E. (2019). Mind the Gap: A Landscape Analysis of Open Source Publishing Tools and Platforms. PubPub. https://doi.org/10.21428/6bc8b38c.2e2f6c3f
[1] For more information on how we situate, rather than define, experimental book publishing, see Adema et al., 2022.
[2] Including at Linköping University, The Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (London South Bank University), Utrecht University Library, The Alan Turing Institute, Northumbria University Library, The Multimodal Appreciation project (Berlin), The Sonic Screen Lab (London College of Communication – University of the Arts London), The Centre for Practice Research in the Arts (CePRA – Leeds University), The 4S/EASST conference (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Art Hub (Copenhagen), the OASPA Conference (Lisbon), the 2nd Global Summit on Diamond Open Access (Capetown) and The Oxford Forum for Open Scholarship (forthcoming).
[3] The Compendium itself will continue to be hosted on a server maintained by the Centre for Postdigital Cultures after the OBF project ends.
[5] We have briefly considered this availability of underlying data in the development of the Compendium by adding a crude RESTful API which makes the data for tools, practices, and books openly available in Json format. This API requires further development to make it more robust, more machine-readable and add additional data formats like CSV. The API is available at https://compendium.copim.ac.uk/api.
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