COPIM Publishers Workshop – March 2020 – Report

On 16 March 2020 the COPIM Publishers Workshop took place online, discussing issues related to Open Access books. Around thirty attendees took part, including academic publishers, scholarly communications experts and many of the COPIM project participants.

This was the first workshop organised by COPIM, and as such it was very much part of the exploratory scoping stage of our project. In keeping with the spirit of COPIM as a whole, we are not approaching any of the issues we are working on with a set of predetermined solutions in mind—instead we want to think through the problems and opportunities facing Open Access book publishing with a diverse variety of stakeholders, with the intention of developing infrastructure that keeps the needs of our communities at its centre.

This workshop marked a significant step forward in that process. We discussed the present and future of the dissemination and discovery of Open Access books, as well as business models and workflows. We were careful always to keep in mind what is needed to develop a diverse and sustainable Open Access book publishing industry: not aiming for a one-size-fits-all solution.

We are hugely grateful to the experienced and knowledgeable people who joined us on the workshop, and who were so willing to think through these issues with us. Our thanks go to them all.

The report

This report is structured as a series of linked posts, listed below. All this information is publicly shared here, on our open documentation site, as part of our commitment to openly documenting our work and progress.

• Collaborative Library Support and Archival Processes

• Cost and Revenue Models

• Discovery and dissemination — the present

• Discovery and dissemination — the future

• The organisation of the workshop: moving online

Header image: photo by Omar Flores on Unsplash