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Open Access Week Interview with Miranda Barnes

For Open Access Week 2024, members of Team Copim talk about their work and what 'Community over commercialisation' means to them.

Published onOct 25, 2024
Open Access Week Interview with Miranda Barnes

Tell us a little bit about yourself! When did you join the COPIM team?

My name is Miranda Barnes, and I joined the COPIM Project in August 2021 as Research Associate in Archiving and Preserving Open Access Books. I took on this role after three and a half years working as Research Publications Librarian within the library at Bath Spa University. Prior to this, I had been a Creative Writing lecturer at the university when the opportunity came to shift into the above position, working with creative practice researchers and supporting them in the creation of open access portfolios of research to be submitted to the REF. In my work within the library, I learned a lot about the importance of open access and open scholarship, including many of the challenges and obstacles to making open possible. Joining the Copim community has been another brilliant opportunity to learn more in this area, and to help increase equity for the long tail of small and scholar-led publishers that are often at the most risk. While technology has come on leaps and bounds for publishers, allowing for the opportunity to disseminate their important contributions to scholarly knowledge, the long-term protection and availability of these works remains tenuous. And this has to do with the need for community support, as these publishers are left unsupported in a commercially-focused publishing landscape.

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?

We already know the dangers that the commercially dominant publishing landscape can pose for small academic publishers, particularly those that have little or no institutional funding support and small teams with limited capacity.[1] The nature of the commercial market prioritises the profit model, which means all other forms of “value” become secondary or, in some cases, abandoned altogether.

If those in charge of commercial infrastructure are “motivated by financial imperatives and answerable to shareholders who may not be a part of a scholarly community,” as articulated by Copim authors in this post, then the needs and values of the scholarly community are thinly considered, at best, and ignored in favour of the bottom line. Contrary to this, community-led organisations must answer to and act in the interests of the communities they serve. As others have already pointed out, the importance of a community-led approach brings together those with common and shared values to do just that.

Our work within the archiving and preservation team, both as part of the COPIM Project and into Open Book Futures, has focused on how the community can serve and support the needs of the small publisher of open access monographs. The work of Mikael Laakso and his co-authors has uncovered the extent of open access scholarship loss, firstly concerning journal articles,[2] which revealed a stunning 174 open access journals had disappeared completely from the web between the years 2000 and 2019. Laakso also worked with CLOCKSS and OAPEN to determine the preservation status of open access monographs, which proved challenging due to the fragmentation of data sources, and also the large size of data sets which are available.[3] However, resultant findings revealed that of “396,995 unique records…identified from the OA book bibliometric sources,” only “19% were found to be included in at least one of the preservation services.”[4] This confirms the existence of an equally concerning long tail of OA monographs at risk of disappearing, which makes our work that much more urgent. Thankfully, the digital preservation community is just that, a community, and one that has at its heart the desire to protect and preserve digital knowledge for future generations.

The digital preservation community as a whole is small and under-resourced, despite the rapidly accelerating amount of born-digital material being created each day, not least within academic publishing. The archiving and preservation queries being regularly raised outstrip the resources available to solve them, as more and newer technology is created to produce new digital objects and publications without the consideration of how and where they will be kept safe for future access. This is something that the Mellon-funded projects at NYU, Preserving New Forms of Scholarship[5] and Embedding Preservability[6], have been working on intensively.

Despite these limitations, the digital preservation community is one that is largely built around collaboration and community, rather than a highly commercial enterprise. A key partner for the archiving and preservation work package within COPIM and OBF has been the Digital Preservation Coalition, who we work with closely. The DPC is a not-for-profit organisation working to connect the digital preservation community, effectively educate and inform those working in the field, and provide a platform for highlighting good practice and exchange of professional expertise.[7] The DPC also works to influence policy makers and raise awareness through educational materials and informative events.

Two of the key digital preservation archives for published scholarly works are Portico and CLOCKSS, both of which are nonprofit entities with substantive community involvement. Portico, which is part of ITHAKA, a knowledge and education nonprofit, is a comprehensive digital preservation archive committed to long-term, active preservation of scholarly resources in a variety of file formats. It is overseen by ITHAKA’s Board of Trustees, made up of researchers, librarians, publishers, university leadership members, all of whom are members of the academic community who have a vested interest in long-term preservation of scholarship.[8] Portico also has its own advisory committee of librarians and publishers. Beyond governance, Portico is also deeply committed to community involvement.[9]

CLOCKSS, which stands for Controlled LOCKSS, is built on the open-source LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe) software first created at Stanford University in 1999. CLOCKSS also has a Board of Directors made up of librarians and publishes, in equal measure, to guide decision-making.[10] CLOCKSS operates 12 archive nodes in diverse geographical locations at leading academic institutions. CLOCKSS operates a library-led preservation approach, seeks out community collaboration for the “common good”, and provides funding to the broader network of LOCKSS digital archives.

We have worked closely with members of Portico and CLOCKSS in varying capacities and continue to maintain a positive relationship with both archives, and we are keen to see how we can grow these relationships in the future.

Throughout our early work in on the Thoth Archiving Network, we also have experienced some wonderful collaboration within libraries and institutional repositories. A workshop we held with members of UKCORR[11], a UK-based organisation for repositories and open access professionals, revealed to us just how keen librarians and repository managers are to work collaboratively towards solutions to help small OA publishers.[12] Cambridge University Libraries[13] and Loughborough University’s library have actively worked with us to develop and test institutional repository involvement.

In the archiving and preservation work package, we benefit from a lot of the community-building that has come before us in the wider digital preservation community. If digital preservation as a field was less community-focused and serving, and more commercial, we wouldn’t have the same ground to build on. By joining together, and through further and deeper collaboration, we envision a future where the whole community is truly served in and equitable way on every level, including those members too often left behind. Only by remaining focused on the needs of the community stakeholders over commercialisation and profit can we continue to contribute meaningfully to doing so.

Banner Image: Photo by "My Life Through A Lens" on Unsplash

[1] Barnes, M. (2022) ‘WP7 Scoping Report on Archiving and Preserving OA Monographs’. Zenodo. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.6725309.

[2] Laakso M, Matthias L, Jahn N. Open is not forever: A study of vanished open access journals. J Assoc Inf Sci Technol. 2021; 72: 1099–1112. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24460

[3] Laakso, M., Wise, A. and Snijder, R. (2022) ‘Peering Into the Jungle: Challenges in determining preservation status of open access books’, Conference Proceedings - IPres 2022, pp. 388 – 391. https://ipres2022.scot/conference-proceedings/

[4] Laakso, M. (2023), "Open access books through open data sources: assessing prevalence, providers, and preservation", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 79 No. 7, pp. 157-177. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-02-2023-0016

[5] https://archive.nyu.edu/handle/2451/63332

[6] https://wp.nyu.edu/embedding_preservability/

[7] https://www.dpconline.org/

[8] https://www.portico.org/governance/

[9] https://www.portico.org/our-work/community-involvement/

[10] https://clockss.org/

[11]  https://www.ukcorr.org/

[12]   Barnes, M. (2023). Thoth Archiving Network Workshop, November 2022. Copim. https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.22f8d148

[13]   Barnes, M. (2024). The Thoth Archiving Network goes live at the University of Cambridge. Copim. https://copim.pubpub.org/pub/thoth-archiving-network-goes-live-at-university-of-cambridge

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