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The Copim Perspective on Community-Led

In this post, we outline what community-led means to us in theory and in practice, how it can be identified in organisations, and some of our concerns about the co-option of the term.

Published onOct 22, 2024
The Copim Perspective on Community-Led
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For the second year in a row, International Open Access Week has chosen as its theme ‘Community over Commercialisation’. This emphasis, despite the outpouring of engagement last year, indicates how complex and unresolved the topic is. 

A number of stakeholders consider ‘community’ through a number of lenses; many publishers make claims to earnest and meaningful engagement with the academic community who make up their authors, while many open access or open infrastructure organisations (including our own) make claims to community engagement or to being community-led. Meanwhile, many libraries judge (some) OA initiatives on aspects including community governance and/or non-commercial ownership. But what does it actually mean to be community-led? 

Community-led at Copim: Theory and Practice

Copim Open Book Futures has centred ‘community-led’ from the very start of the project in 2019 – in fact, it is the ‘C’ that begins the acronym of our name. It is a subject close to our hearts and often on our minds. It is also a concept that was articulated at an early stage in our project, and which has continued to be a fundamental part of it to this day. 

One of the major driving forces behind Copim was to seriously and meaningfully apply the principles of community-led publishing infrastructure. One of the Work Packages on the first stage of our project (2019-2022) was on community governance. It aimed at: 

...exploring community governance with a view to designing the policies and procedures for community oversight of the infrastructures and models that the COPIM project is developing. Our aim is to create durable organisational structures for the coordination, governance and administrative support of the project’s community-owned infrastructures. This includes developing new avenues of outreach, communication and partnership with diverse stakeholders in open research with a shared interest in this infrastructure, creating genuine community involvement and collective control. This also involves ensuring the infrastructures won’t be governed by a particular commercial interest.

Revisiting documentation of our early project work, it becomes clear that Copim’s notion has always been one of a “community of communities”.1 As has been described elsewhere, ‘community-led’ as an adjective has thus always indicated “an inclusive ‘big tent’ approach that seeks to bring together a wide variety of actors from a diverse spectrum of backgrounds, disciplines, and academic contexts under one larger umbrella”2 that share a common set of values. There were several written outputs from the governance work package, available here, as well as a working group up on Humanities Commons (now called Knowledge Commons). 

Today, Copim has two separate advisory bodies: an Advisory Board which meets twice a year, and which is invited to give advice and feedback on Copim’s work, issues, and plans. In addition, and separately, we have a project-related Governance Group that meets quarterly, whose function is particularly to provide oversight into our conduct as a funded project and the successful delivery of the project’s work. Some of the Work Packages have governance structures integrated into their work, particularly those that are focused on the activities of organisations that have incorporated as charities and non-profits. 

The Open Book Collective

The Open Book Collective (WP2), which was registered as a full Charity earlier this year, has instituted robust community-led governance, comprising distinct parts, each with their own function. The General Assembly of Custodians, a body which all members of the collective are able to join, holds an annual Assembly, where Custodians vote on and/or approve annual activity reports, financial audits and annual financial statements, and any changes to the OBC’s Articles of Association (constitution). It also ensures that the OBC is fulfilling its requirements as a registered charity. There is also a Board of Stewards, made up of 9 elected members who comprise a cross section of the community.3 Stewards are the designated ‘Trustees’ of the charity and  are legally responsible for ongoing governance, ensuring that the OBC keeps to its mission, including providing oversight to the Management Team to which it delegates responsibility for the day to day work of the OBC. It also does more practical work such as ratifying recommendations of Committees it has set up and engaging in strategic and financial planning, as well as ensuring any conflicts of interest that might emerge are appropriately managed. The Membership Committee is particularly important; it is made up of three Stewards and  scrutinises new applications for membership of the OBC from publishers and publishing service providers, ensuring adherence to the OBC’s Membership Criteria. Committees can also include non-board members. For example, the Committee that was set up to provide recommendations to the Board about the awarding of Collective Development Fund grants comprised members of the Board alongside Custodians and some of the reviewers of applications for funding. The key values of the organisation which these structures work towards are also clearly and publicly stated. 

Next to its member-led governance model, the Open Book Collective’s full Charity status also helps provide protection against any potential future attempts at commercial acquisition. The OBC is therefore underpinned by community governance structures at both micro and macro levels.   

Thoth Open Metadata

Thoth Open Metadata (WP4) has been set up as a UK Community Interest Company (CIC) limited by guarantee, to ensure that the community’s interest are being met, that no private gain (such as paying out dividends to its membership) is sought, and any surplus or assets are used principally for the benefit of the community. Thoth has been formed as a “large membership” CIC, which means that the members have ultimate control over the activities of the CIC. It also requires there to be more members than Directors and allows for the membership to grow as the company grows. These members collectively decide when and how the overall membership will grow. Another key feature of a Community Interest Company is the Asset Lock, which guarantees transfer of resources to a predefined set of organisations in the case of the CIC facing insolvency. The Membership approves the appointments of Thoth’s Board of Directors, which is responsible for proper management of the company’s business. Directors are held accountable by the company’s wider Membership of stakeholders. With regards to financial transparency, Thoth makes its annual accounts publicly available via Companies House. Any entity from Thoth’s larger community can become a Member of the CIC, and thus actively engage in Thoth’s community governance.

Opening the Future

Opening the Future (WP3) has set up its own library advisory board (which will have its first meeting just after Open Access Week 2024). The work package team members realised that they needed further community input on their activities, in order to refine their funding model to work as harmoniously with library members as possible. 

Copim itself

The governance of the Copim community remains largely horizontal, informal and community-informed, while our more embodied elements, OBC and Thoth, have adopted differing forms of community-led, formalised governance. Therefore, both in theory and in practice, both the ideals and the practicalities of being ‘community-led’ have been a key feature of Copim from the start. The reasons for a community-led approach to knowledge dissemination are manifold.

Why does community-led matter?

‘Scaling small’4 is a set of values and way of working that Copim associates very strongly with what it means to do ‘community’, and to be ‘community-led’. It is an approach that focuses on moving away from large-scale commercial publishers and infrastructure, which are motivated by financial imperatives and answerable to shareholders who may not be part of a scholarly community, towards horizontal, cooperative, and knowledge-sharing approaches, governed by the research community and open to wide participation. This is partly in response to the fact that, over the last several years, the publication and dissemination of research has been concentrated into a very small number of hands; this has had powerful financial and cultural implications for academics, universities, policymakers and others. 

The amount of revenue that can be generated by the participants in this relatively small system is demonstrably very large. A recent piece of research by Canadian libraries demonstrated how a large proportion of journals charging author-facing fees had increased these fees above inflation between 2019-2023,5 rising to c.$9 billion paid to the six largest publishers in APCs between those years.6 An earlier piece of research calculated the astronomical amounts of money being paid into this system between 2015-2018, with extremely large profit margins noted in the conclusion.7 When this money is paid to large commercial publishers including Springer Nature and Elsevier, a substantial percentage is paid to shareholders, and thus evaporates from the scholarly communications system — a loss that has been compounded by the length of time for which these margins have been maintained and increased. 

There is therefore a powerful incentive for large commercial companies to dominate research dissemination: but as a result, those systems are run not to serve the benefit of researchers or the communities and countries that fund research. Instead they are run to maximise financial returns to the shareholders of those companies, with very little — if any — scholarly control. Community-led organisations are obligated to work for the benefit of their community or communities, are answerable to them and cede a substantial measure of control to them, whereas commercial companies are obligated to work for the financial benefit of their shareholders, are answerable to them, and must ultimately act in their interests.

While much of scholarly publishing and dissemination is still in the hands of large, profit-driven organisations, there is a growing set of more community-minded projects that are seeking to build an alternative ecosystem. In the books world, we are particularly interested in developments such as the Open Institutional Publishing Association in the UK, the New University Presses in the Netherlands and the Irish Open Access Publishers, as well as more established organisations such as the OAPEN Foundation. These organisations are invested in growing equitable and resilient OA publishing via mutual support and collaboration rather than competition, which is a spirit we recognise from our work with Copim and other communities. And European projects DIAMAS, CRAFT-OA and PALOMERA have emphasised their interest in ‘community-driven pathways’ to building research infrastructure.8 These initiatives and others like them are often dismissed as small-scale and unworkable, but as coordination between them increases via fora like OPERAS (to give a European example — of which two Copim initiatives, Thoth Open Metadata and the Open Book Collective, have recently become Members), there is the potential for them to carry greater weight in the scholarly communications landscape.

‘Diamond’ OA is also the focus of increasing attention worldwide (some parts of the world, such as South America, being more advanced in this respect than others) with the DIAMAS project in Europe, the UNESCO Global Diamond Open Access Alliance, and the Global Summit on Diamond Open Access prominent among other initiatives. Diamond OA is a form of OA where the author is not charged any publication fees, but there are also debates about whether it should be defined as having an explicit community-led component — a debate that looks likely to intensify as more attention — and money — is directed towards this form of publishing.9

It is a testament to the increasing goodwill and investment of the wider academic and knowledge dissemination communities in open and community-led forms of publishing that we have begun to see what some have termed ‘openwashing’ and its cousin ‘community-washing’.

Openwashing and community-washing

There is a pervasive history of openwashing — where a “product or company is spun as open, although it is not” (Thorne, 2009), or where there is a pretence of appearing open for marketing purposes (Watters, 2014)— in various contexts. Copim colleagues have previously addressed this in relation to open access and open source software within scholarly contexts. However, a further extension of the practice is emerging in the form of ‘community-washing’. 

By community-washing, we refer to the cynical and superficial adoption of community-related language to disguise hierarchical commercial bureaucracy as that of a self-organised, grassroots community, or, more loosely, to try to associate the goodwill inspired by the term with initiatives that appear in no meaningful sense to be community-driven. Such community-washing is not the sole preserve of scholarly publishing, and can be seen in disparate digital spaces, such as Spotify and Doordash.10 However, the emerging community-washing practices in Diamond OA spaces pose a significant threat to the establishment and nurturing of genuine communities and ecologies for Diamond OA’s sustainability.

Identifying the hallmarks of community-led practices

But how can genuinely community-led organisations be recognised by external parties? There are, among doubtless many others, two broad approaches we suggest in particular; assessing the organisation’s level of community participation, and assessing its governance. 

Regarding community participation: 

  • Can an organisation define its community (or communities)?

  • Are there mechanisms for this community to have a direct influence over what the organisation does?

  • Can a single entity (be it a person, company, institution, state) unilaterally take a decision within the community-led organisation against the will of the community as it is expressed via these mechanisms?

  • Does the community-led organisation give back to the community in concrete and specific ways that go beyond ‘we provide content / services for a fee’? 

  • Is the organisation transparent about the input it receives from the community and how this informs its actions?

In the course of developing Copim’s own governance, some of the research reports we have published may provide guidance on assessing specific governance structures: 

  • Does the organisation have clear mission, vision, values, and principles statements which are tied to measurable and concrete goals?11  

  • Is there a Code of Conduct and Code of Ethics for members? Are there working groups, committees, or task forces within the organisation that address issues of DEIA and Anti-Racism?12 

  • Is there a defined, clear and research-rooted method for nominating and appointing Board members?13 

  • Is there a defined, clear and democratic method of seeking consensus and making decisions within the organisation?14 

  • Are there indications that the organisation assesses its own governance and makes amendments as it sees fit in order to maintain and improve good governance practices?15 

We particularly recommend the report by Hart et al., 2022, which pairs the principles (listed above) with detailed descriptions of how Copim has applied these principles in practice.

Conclusion

We would like to return to the phrasing of this year’s OA week theme, Community over commercialisation. All (or perhaps almost all) open access, open infrastructure, and open data organisations, and many communities of practice, engage in at least some commercial activities. Some very obviously, such as publishers selling books or infrastructure providers selling services, some perhaps more obliquely, for example in needing to pay for staff time, or cloud storage, or third party services. 

We believe this is why it is so important to centre community within the governance and activities of open organisations, to ensure that the difficult question of how to balance commercial considerations with serving the needs of not just the organisation’s own community, but the wider public too, is continually subject to scrutiny and ongoing debate and consensus. In particular, we would like to see more careful consideration of the issue of governance within these conversations, and more explicit examination and discussion of the claims made by different organisations about their relationship to their communities. This is not necessarily to ‘catch people out’, but because even well-intentioned organisations can benefit from reflecting on their governance structures and their communications (we are certainly not perfect ourselves in this regard). ‘Community over commercialisation’ can be an easy slogan, but if we are to take it seriously, it should be much more than that. 


Header image: Copim remix, photo by Matthew Brodeur on Unsplash.

Comments
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Christophe Dony:

Thanks for this piece ! I wonder if and how this multifaceted understanding of community-led could practically make its way into The “How Equitable Is It” tool currently being developed by Coalition S and other stakeholders (https://www.coalition-s.org/new-tool-to-assess-equity-in-scholarly-communication-models/)., ? Say, as a way to strengthen or guide libraries, for example, in making decisions to fund or sponsor particular community-oriented open (publishing) initiatives. Any tips or ideas appreciated.