OPERAS recently published a farewell post for Graham Stone, in response to the news that Graham has decided to step away from Jisc to explore new opportunities. As described in the OPERAS piece, Graham’s contributions to the Open Access landscape have been “invaluable, and his legacy will remain with us as we continue the work he so passionately supported”. At Copim we have benefitted from Graham’s expertise, ideas and kindness in countless ways, and so we also wanted to take this opportunity to thank our friend and colleague. We hope to be able to work with him again in future – perhaps with Graham wearing some different “hats”!
Graham’s contributions to Copim
Graham has been involved in Copim from the very start. The first Copim project, Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs, kicked off in earnest with a project meeting at Coventry University in January 2020. Graham of course joined, as the staged project photo confirms. Little did we know that very few of us would see each other again, in person, until after the very worst of the COVID-19 pandemic had passed. We got used to seeing Graham, and everyone else, in small boxes on video calls, in online meetings, workshops and conferences. This did not stop Graham having an outsized impact on our work.
Fig. 1: A group picture of many of the participants contributing to the first Copim project, Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs, taken at Coventry University’s Lanchester Library.
Given Graham’s vast experience working within open access, and especially open access books, it would make little sense to suggest that there is any one origin point to Graham’s involvement in Copim. However, at least some of the foundations were laid by a previous collaboration with Janneke Adema (PI on the first Copim project), in a collaborative research project for Jisc scoping out the open publishing ecologies that were increasingly emerging. The resulting report focused particular attention on the role of so-called “New University Presses” (NUP) and academic-led publishing. Both were to become central parts of Copim’s work. Graham is one of the key (if not the key) experts on these topics, as further evidenced by his doctoral thesis (2017), in which he examines the process of “developing a sustainable publishing model for a university press”.
In addition to being a wealth of knowledge, Graham is skilled at making connections and acting as the “glue” that links various parts of the open access books landscape, including those bits in which Copim is involved. We have lost count of the number of times he has helped bring together different OA groups, from publishers, to libraries, to infrastructure providers – to help us with our work.
Graham’s contributions to the OA landscape
Graham’s contributions (so far!) to the field of open access book publishing are extensive, and any summary we can offer will doubtless miss things out. He was deeply involved in the founding of the open access University of Huddersfield Press in 2007, a significant achievement at a time when many publishers and universities had yet to reckon with the opportunities and challenges presented by open access.
As well as this deeply practical work, Graham has been involved in writing numerous reports, white papers, articles and so on, undertaking important thinking and research that has guided the progress of OA books over the last decade. One example is Graham’s contributions to the article “Cost estimates of an open access mandate for monographs in the UK’s third Research Excellence Framework” (2017), co-written with Martin Paul Eve, Kitty Inglis, David Prosser and Lara Speicher: vital research that has continued to inform recent, renewed debate on REF2029 and the inclusion of OA Monographs. Graham also co-wrote the article “Rebels with a Cause? Supporting Library and Academic-Led Open Access Publishing?”(2019), with Copim’s Joe Deville and Jeroen Sondervan and Sofie Wennström, in which he helps to outline a brighter future for OA book publishing. Graham’s valuable insights also contributed to, “Building an Open Dissemination System”(2020), written with Rupert Gatti, Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, Javier Arias, Tobias Steiner, and Eelco Ferwerda, which helped to lay the groundwork for the creation of Thoth Open Metadata. Recently, Graham was co-author on PALOMERA’s “Recommendations for Open Access Books” report (2024), a key output for this important project.
Graham’s work with colleagues at Jisc in recent years included being heavily involved in Jisc’s support of UKRI OA policy – including its OA book policy, a leap that has so far proved beyond many other national funders in the UK and elsewhere. At Copim, we were always grateful when Graham could offer insights and advice informed by his role at Jisc, although we know we only ever had a very limited view of his contributions there.
Graham’s impact with OPERAS is perhaps best reflected in their own recent and affectionate blog post, and it includes his recent involvement on projects including DIAMAS and PALOMERA, where his knowledge, energy and sharp eye for detail made a big difference, and his role on the Executive Assembly on behalf of Jisc, helping to support and develop the OPERAS community and the soon-to-be-launched UK national node of OPERAS, which is now under the leadership of his colleagues. Demonstrating a seemingly unending appetite for Zoom meetings, Graham was also the leader of the Open Access Business Models Special Interest Group (SIG) at OPERAS, as well as the Open Access Books Network SIG, where again his good humour, deep knowledge and wide network was very much welcomed.
Perhaps Graham’s most notable role in the OA books landscape has been as a community builder. As well as his work with OPERAS, he played a fundamental role in setting up the Open Institutional Publishing Association (OIPA), a significant new association of university-based OA publishing presses and projects in the UK, and he has also been closely involved in other communities, including the Irish Open Access Publishers and the Library Publishing Coalition in the US. One of his many skills is his ability to draw links between these different communities and connect them with each other, and his emphasis on the value of knowledge-sharing and cooperation are reflected in some of the Copim team’s earliest memories of Graham: when they went to visit him for advice on setting up a library-based university press of their own, a project that became the White Rose University Press.
And, just because…
No post dedicated to Graham could miss an opportunity to commend him on his excellent beard, here’s a chart scientifically mapping another of Graham’s key attributes:
Fig. 2: An indication of the evolution of Graham’s beard during his time on Copim.
Graham has always been a central member of the Copim community and a tireless champion of our work. We’re very grateful to have this chance to champion him and to share our appreciation for all his contributions. But, we do hope that this post won’t truly mark a farewell – we’d miss him too much!
Graham, thank you for everything, and very best wishes from your friends at Copim.
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0)
