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Announcing COPIM's 'Good, Better, Best' Practices guide for the small monograph press

A combined guidebook and report now published, examining current archiving & preservation practice and providing guidance to the small or scholar-led open monograph publisher

Published onMay 12, 2023
Announcing COPIM's 'Good, Better, Best' Practices guide for the small monograph press

Over the course of the COPIM Project, colleagues in Work Package 7 (Archiving & Preservation) have been working with the open access monograph publishing community, university libraries, and digital preservation experts to examine current archiving and preservation practices. Aligned to the principles of “scaling small”, key within COPIM overall, Work Package 7 has been focused on the small and scholar-led, or academic-led, publisher. These publishers make up a substantial subset of the “long tail” of publishers left out of the benefits achieved by larger and better-supported presses, and archiving and preservation are no different.

Beginning with the interviews and workshops that fed into our Scoping Report, Work Package 7 consulted and liaised with a wide variety of stakeholders and experts to ensure the best understanding of the preservation ecosystem. These included digital preservation experts (including those working for digital preservation archives, those who work for institutions and organisations where preservation is one part of their work, and those involved in related projects); publishers (both those involved in COPIM and external partners); librarians; and technical experts, as well as colleagues working in complimentary areas of research, such as the Embedding Preservability project at NYU, and the EaaSI (Emulation as a Service Infrastructure) project. Along with internal and external workshops around copyright, robust links, and repositories, Work Package 7 undertook a small survey of current practices among small and scholar-led presses and their needs for guidance.

The result of these efforts is now published in the form of this combined guidebook and report: ‘Good, Better, Best’: Practices in Archiving & Preserving Open Access Monographs’.

Chapter 1 provides background information on the work of the package and current policy and practice context.

Chapter 2, the “good, better, best” practice guidebook, is a starting point for good practice in archiving and preservation for small and scholar-led presses that will also potentially benefit other types of presses, including new university presses.

Chapters 3 and 4 detail the workflow experimentations done within university repositories, both manual and programmatically automated, that contributed towards developing the Thoth Archiving Network proof-of-concept.

Chapter 5 examines in more detail the development of the dissemination tool within Thoth, the metadata management platform built within COPIM’s Work Package 5. Already a part of Thoth’s roadmap, the Thoth Dissemination Service is a new layer in development that would be used to archive the open access monographs of small and scholar-led publishers on institutional repository platforms, as well as within the Internet Archive. This chapter describes the successful proof-of-concept deposits within the Internet Archive and Loughborough University’s Figshare instance.

Chapter 6 considers implications of archiving and preservation for experimental open access monographs, in particular those created as part of COPIM’s Work Package 6, but also more broadly.

Chapter 7 introduces the Thoth Archiving Network and details the points discussed during the Thoth Archiving Network workshop held with members of UKCORR.

And lastly, Chapter 8 looks to the future, as we move forward into the new Open Book Futures project, and what then ambitions are for Work Package 7’s new iteration.

You can read and download the new guidebook and report here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7876048

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