Open Access Week Interview with Joanne Fitzpatrick

The Copim team talks with Joanne Fitzpatrick, leading Copim's new Accessibility Work Package as part of the Open Book Futures project.

How do you interpret the theme "Community over Commercialisation" in the context of Open Access Week 2024 and your work, and why is it important for the field of open scholarship?

For me, working to make open access monographs produced by small publishers as accessible as they can be, this means my number one priority is the end user of that research output, and whether they have got what they need to access the material. Understanding accessibility needs in that user centric way can only happen through supportive communities, where it becomes safe to share needs, and the reasons for those needs. This will enable COPIM to support accessibility beyond just meeting legislative requirements, and meeting standards such as WCAG 2.2 AA, but providing something that is truly reflective of the audience for open access monographs. In addition, small publishers face tight resourcing constraints, and while they generally understand the benefit of maximising accessibility, and therefore usability of their outputs, and most definitely have the will to make things better for those with accessibility needs, they need to be incredibly careful with what can realistically be achieved. Communities of small publishers, like the Open Book Collective, can share knowledge, tools and workflow planning between themselves in a way that will help with this problem, and because we are scaling small and building sustainable funding models, there is no risk to the ongoing commercial success from that activity.

In your opinion, what are the key challenges and drawbacks when commercial interests take precedence in knowledge production, as opposed to prioritizing researchers and the public?

Again focusing on accessibility, monographs that are behind a paywall and fall under copyright restrictions require specific exemptions to legislation in order to produce accessible versions of them. Under the international Marrakesh Treaty, it is permitted to produce accessible copies of copyrighted material for users with visual impairments, and share those copies across borders. Generally this exemption is not valid if there is an accessible version available from the publisher – and this leaves those with accessibility requirements potentially in the position where they are required to pay more to a large commercial publisher for an accessible copy. This exemption to the law is not required for open access monographs that permit them to be re-used in any way by anyone – even where ‘no derivatives’ is specified in the Creative Commons license, this would only apply to sharing the modified accessible version, not creating it.

When does the collection and use of personal data begin to undermine academic freedom, especially in the context of open scholarship and open access publishing?

Just a short note from me in this area – it is always better to design born accessible eBooks, rather than operate a reactive model where accessible features are created on individual request. In the EU from June 2025 it will be a legal requirement to provide some feedback mechanism where individual end users can highlight accessibility issues found, which is important, but should not be relied on as the sole method of providing accessible formats. This is because it requires that end user to disclose their disability or health condition, so avoiding collecting that data where possible is preferred.

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