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Looking back at COPIM... and on to new adventures, with Open Book Futures!

With the COPIM project having finished at the end of 04/2023, we are looking back on what COPIM has been able to achieve over the last 3.5 years, before also casting a look ahead to the next project phase of Open Book Futures (05/2023-04/2026).

Published onOct 09, 2023
Looking back at COPIM... and on to new adventures, with Open Book Futures!
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Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs: Final Report
Description

Right from its inception, COPIM has been committed to exploring solutions to some of the most pressing issues and problems that prevent small open access (OA) book publishers from interfacing with large-scale publishing infrastructures, organisations, and processes. This commitment is reflected in the major improvements COPIM has developed over the last 3.5 years (Nov 2019 to April 2023) in the form of a significantly enriched, not-for-profit, and open-source ecosystem for OA book publishing; an ecosystem that is now growing to help support and sustain a diversity of publishing initiatives and models, particularly within Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) publishing. The alternative infrastructures, business and revenue models, preservation structures, and governance procedures that have been scoped, developed, and proof-of-concept-delivered through COPIM, enable increased economic resilience and enhanced capacities for the publication and dissemination of open access books at a variety of scales. COPIM's Scaling Small approach offers Higher Education institutions and HSS researchers sustainable publishing models that they control, providing them with increased publishing options, new revenue streams, and cost reductions that are designed to help build a more equitable, horizontal, and co-operative knowledge sharing community. COPIM has used the project's final 18 months (including a no-cost extension of six months due to the coronavirus emergency) to successfully deliver in the areas of collaborative research, infrastructure development, governance work, and outreach and community building, while also contributing to policy consultations in an international context. Further evolving its approach to cope with the continued and compounding challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic, Brexit, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a heat-or-eat crisis/recession, and UCU strikes for better pay, and further emerging issues on regional and global scales have posed to the Higher Education sector and beyond, the project has succeeded in meeting the vast majority of its deliverables and milestones across all work packages over the last few months, in some areas even outperforming the initial goals set and superseding expectations. The final list of key outputs and activities delivered across the project's lifespan include: publication of 13 major scoping reports, 3 annual project reports, plus a variety of research papers published in peer-reviewed journals; successful organisation and documentation of 26 workshops, with more than 220 national and international stakeholders representing 25 countries. presentation of COPIM work at more than 120 international conferences, workshops, and events. set-up an iterative extension of an Outreach and Dissemination network that is combining a variety of channels, including social media and open community platforms. following the platform's beta launch in 2021, the successful inception of Thoth, COPIM’s Open Dissemination System, as a Community Interest Company under the name of Thoth Open Metadata CIC. Thoth now makes open access book metadata available in an open, transparent, and participatory way via its open API, and publishers can use the platform's interface to create rich, open metadata for direct dissemination in a variety of global channels. launch of the Open Book Collective platform and community of OA book publishers, infrastructure providers, and libraries that are collaborating to bring about a future for OA book publishing free from inequitable Book Processing Charges. This included generating more than £100,000 in invoiced income to date, and over £14,000 of income expected to be invoiced shortly, 90% of which will flow either direct to OA book publishers and service providers or to the wider OA publishing ecosystem via our grant giving Collective Development Fund. It has also implemented a robust legal, financial, and governance model to ensure longer-term stability of the Open Book Collective legal entity which has been registered as a CCLG in the UK in 2022. further strengthening of the Opening the Future revenue model via the two publishers, CEU Press and Liverpool University Press, that COPIM has been working with. Through Opening the Future, both presses have released 15 new monographs between them, and have accrued enough funding through the programme for approximately 45 titles to be published OA in the coming months/years. launch of the Experimental Publishing Compendium, as a comprehensive online resource bringing together tools, practices, and books to promote and support the publication of experimental book publications. establishing the Thoth Archiving Network, a community-led collaboration between university repositories and national libraries to facilitate archiving and preservation of OA books via COPIM's Open Dissemination System Thoth, particularly those published by small and medium-sized publishers that might not have the resources to invest in other, more expensive means of archiving. The COPIM project has continued and deepened its engagement with the work packages’ variety of stakeholders (i.e., librarians, publishers, researchers, technology providers, and the general public), bringing together key experts and those interested in learning more about scholar-led, not-for-profit, OA book publishing. Alongside its own event organisation and outreach activities, COPIM has been involved in the Open Access Book Network, while COPIM team members have participated in a wide range of conferences, events, and network events organised by partner organisations and projects such as OASPA, OPERAS, LIBER, the Next Generation Library Publishing project, Invest in Open Infrastructure, OpenAIRE, The British Library, COAR, EIFL, Open Access Australasia, and the European Open Science Cloud. The sustained progress against the original plan is particularly noteworthy as the project had to work with the continued and compounding effects of the various systemic challenges that COPIM has faced since its inception. As has been outlined in previous reports, Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic – along with the systemic effects these events continue to have on the Higher Education sector as a whole – has impacted much of the project work on COPIM. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has added further volatility to the sector. As a result, the project has had to accommodate a variety of delays in staff recruitment along with an increase in pandemic-related limitations to the availability of staff members due to extended care duties and the toll on health and wellbeing of all involved. In addition to that, library budgets have declined due to COVID-19 pandemic cuts in funding for HE institutions and library budgets. As per feedback received from librarians, many budgets have been reduced to ‘essential spending only’. This has directly impacted the outreach conducted by WPs 2 and 3. Despite these challenges COPIM has, together with its evolving network of stakeholders, now successfully implemented its open infrastructure proof-of-concepts together with the corresponding systems of governance that had been conceptualised over its first two years. The six-month no-cost extension that COPIM requested from its funders to make effective use of the budget underspend accrued during the project’s lifetime due to the above-mentioned systemic challenges, has proven fruitful and enabled the team to succeed in completing its work on the envisioned proof-of-concepts for an alternative ecosystem of open infrastructures for monographs.

We are very pleased to announce the release of the final report of the COPIM project, which is now available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7961527.

The COPIM project finished at the end of April of 2023 and together with various new partners and collaborators the Copim community is now already a few months into the new and ongoing Open Book Futures project, which kicked off in May, and which will run through April 2026! In the midst of this transition and at the start of a new project, we wanted to look back with you at all that we have achieved with the COPIM project, before giving some sneak peeks about what is still to come with Open Book Futures!

COPIM End-of-project highlights. Data from 04/2023.
Source: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7961527

Right from its inception, the Copim community has been committed to exploring solutions to some of the most pressing issues and problems that prevent smaller and medium-sized open access (OA) book publishers from interfacing with large-scale publishing infrastructures, organisations, and processes. This commitment has been reflected in the major improvements the COPIM project has developed over the last 3.5 years (Nov 2019 to April 2023).

The COPIM project has operated as an international partnership between different organisations: open access publishers, libraries, universities, and infrastructure providers. We have developed alternative infrastructures, business and revenue models, preservation structures, experimental publishing pilots and workflows, community-led governance procedures, and various OA books toolkits and resources, all designed to sustain a diversity of publishing initiatives and models and to support a growing not-for-profit and open-source ecosystem for OA book publishing.

Following our Scaling Small approach, our outreach work and community building has focused on setting up collaborations with and between community-driven publishing pro­jects that promote more equitable, horizontal, and bibliodiverse systems for scholarly communication.

We couldn’t have done this work without support from our funders, the Research England Development Fund and Arcadia (who are also generously funding Open Book Futures), and the help, encouragement, and advice from the groups, organisations, and individuals in scholarly communication and Higher Education working towards similar aims, and we are very grateful for all their support.

The COPIM project has generated a wealth of reports, conducted numerous workshops with different members of the scholarly publishing community, and our community has given presentations and written articles as well as numerous blog posts to document the progress made on our variety of Work Packages – all available on our Open Documentation site or via our Zenodo community

Some of the key things we have achieved with the COPIM project include:

  1. The Open Book Collective (OBC), a community platform and not-for-profit organisation registered in the UK which enables OA initiatives to seek library support for their publishing activities and libraries to find, assess, and fund them, as well as to easily integrate OA books into library catalogues; the Collective’s members also pay into a development fund that any organisation working with Open Access books can apply to for support in improving their work. At the time of writing, we are happy to say that 32 libraries are now supporting the Open Book Collective, with a total revenue of GBP 170,500 generated to support the 9 initiatives currently represented on the OBC platform (with further members to be joining the collective imminently);

  2. Opening the Future, a revenue model that enables non-OA presses to use their non-OA backlists to fund the publication of new OA frontlist books through collective library subscriptions. Currently in operation with Central European University Press and Liverpool University Press, both presses have released 15 new monographs between them, and have accrued enough funding through the programme for approximately 45 titles to be published OA in the coming months/years;

  3. Thoth, COPIM’s open dissemination system, which has been developed as a one-stop platform to support small and medium-sized publishers with regards to their metadata management, dissemination, and archiving needs. Thoth has been set up as a Community Interest Company registered in the UK under the name of Thoth Open Metadata CIC. Embodying open principles such as open source and open data, Thoth makes open access book metadata available in an open, transparent, and participatory way via its open APIs. To date, 15 publishers — including independent, scholar-led presses as well as university presses — are now either in the process of integrating Thoth in their workflows, or are already actively using the platform's interface and API to create rich, open metadata in multiple formats and platform-specific outputs. Outputs automatically generated via Thoth’s Export API include e.g. ONIX 3.0 files adhering to the specifications of e.g. OAPEN/DOAB, Project MUSE, JSTOR, GoogleBooks, and OverDrive, ONIX 2.1 files following requirements of EBSCOHost and ProQuest Ebrary, an XML export supporting DOI registration with Crossref, as well as other formats such as JSON, KBART, CSV, BibTeX, and MARC records - all of which in turn enable publishers to disseminate their OA books to the above as well as a variety of other global channels;

  4. Closely linked to the above, practical use cases for bulk-archiving complex OA books, and the establishing of our Thoth Archiving Network, a community-led collaboration between university repositories and national libraries to facilitate archiving and preservation of OA books via Thoth, particularly those published by small and medium-sized publishers that might not have the resources to invest in other, more expensive means of archiving;

  5. A robust governance model for the Open Book Collective, to ensure that it remains community-led, serves its members (including libraries as well as publishers and OA infrastructure providers) and cannot be bought by a commercial company;

  6. Launch of the Experimental Publishing Compendium, a comprehensive online resource bringing together tools, practices, and books to promote and support the publication of experimental book publications;

  7. Rich pilot projects showcasing experimental books and publishing workflows with partnering presses Open Humanities Press, Mattering Press, and Open Book Publishers, to enable OA initiatives to embrace experimental book projects;

  8. A Toolkit for Small and Scholar-led Open Access Publishers, hosted by the Open Book Collective, aimed particularly at providing concrete advice and support for publishers across the various parts of the publishing process. It synthesises information from other existing resources, as well as introducing a range of new case studies, all the while recognising the constraints that such publishers often have.

These outcomes and our sustained progress against what we originally set out to do seem particularly noteworthy as the project had to work with the continued and compounding effects of various systemic challenges since its inception. Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic – along with the systemic effects these events continue to have on the Higher Education sector as a whole – have impacted much of the project work on COPIM. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has added further volatility to the sector, the impact of which was acutely felt by the whole team when one of our Advisory Board members hadn’t been able to particpate in one of our annual project meetings because they had to seek shelter away from home during one of the early Russian bombardments. All in all, the project has had to accommodate a variety of obstacles and delays e.g. to staff recruitment along with an increase in pandemic-related limitations on the availability of staff members due to extended care duties and the toll on health and wellbeing of all involved. In addition to that, library budgets have shrunk considerably due to COVID-19-related cuts in funding for HE institutions and library budgets. With a general demand for easily accessible output having increased exponentially during the pandemic, this has put open access to digital publications front and centre on the agendas of many of the stakeholders involved —including libraries, researchers, students, and publishers — and we have seen a heightened interest in making books available fully open access,1 which in turn led to a notable expansion of existing programmes, while also introducing a number of new OA schemes for open access books.2

The COPIM project has continued and deepened its engagement with the work packages’ variety of stakeholders (i.e., librarians, publishers, researchers, technology providers, and the general public), bringing together key experts and those interested in learning more about community- and scholar-led, not-for-profit, OA book publishing. Alongside our own event organisation and outreach activities, COPIM members have participated in more than 130 international conferences and workshops, presenting on the manifold perspectives that have been woven into COPIM as a whole.

COPIM has, together with its evolving network of stakeholders (including, but not limited to, the Open Access Book Network, OASPA, OPERAS, LIBER, the Next Generation Library Publishing project, Invest in Open Infrastructure, OpenAIRE, The British Library, SciELO Books, the Continental Platform, COAR, EIFL, Open Access Australasia, and the European Open Science Cloud), now successfully implemented its open infrastructure proof-of-concepts together with the corresponding systems of governance that had been conceptualised over its first two years.

International collaborations established during the COPIM project phase (Nov 2019- April 2023).
Source: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7961527

At the end of March 2023, we were delighted to announce that Arcadia and Research England have between them committed £5.8 million (including the project partners’ own contributions) to a project that will significantly accelerate the work of the Open Book Collective, Thoth, and Opening the Future, as well as expand the Experimental Publishing Compendium and the Thoth Archiving Network, and develop technical protocols and infrastructure to enable presses to better integrate accessibility requirements into their workflows. 

This project, called Open Book Futures, started in May 2023 and will run to April 2026. It will reunite many of the COPIM project partners while also bringing in new partners from around the world, extending the stakeholder network to 25 participating institutions, with an aim to deepen COPIM’s long-term impact and to make sure a wider range of voices have the opportunity to shape the future of open access book publishing. Full information including all partners can be found here.

We hope that the work done by the COPIM project, now to be continued with Open Book Futures, will bring us yet another step closer to fully realise an alternative ecosystem that supports communities of scholars, small-to-medium-sized publishers, not-for-profit infrastructure providers and scholarly libraries, enabling community-led open access book publishing in all its plurality to play a significant role in the future of academic books.


Header image by Ian Schneider on Unsplash.

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