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Open Book Collective: A Model for Open Community-led Governance

Published onSep 02, 2022
Open Book Collective: A Model for Open Community-led Governance

We’re thrilled to announce today that the Open Book Collective (OBC) has finalized its founding organisational governance model and we’re excited to share that with the larger community of open access (OA) stakeholders who are collectively working on the transformation of academic book publishing — away from the enclosure of knowledge of traditional proprietary publishing and towards a fully open knowledge commons.

The governance of the Open Book Collective (OBC) has been designed in consultation with a wide variety of stakeholders. Project leaders of the COPIM project (Community-led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Monographs) have consulted with OA publishers, university librarians and library membership organizations, open source infrastructure builders, OA researchers, and members of COPIM’s governance working group. In addition, the OBC governance team conducted research into community-focused open knowledge organizations within the landscape of scholarly communications and better practices for the community governance of open infrastructures. Our consultations and research have informed us every step of the way as we have co-designed and co-developed a governance model that has been uniquely tailored to the mission of the OBC. Our key concern throughout has been that the governance of the OBC be membership-shaped, community-led, democratically representative, equitable, and transparent. Most paramount is that the OBC is and always will be directed and managed in accordance with the key values of the COPIM project.

Ultimately, the governance of the OBC has been designed to empower a unique collaborative community of OA content creators and tools builders, libraries (and other knowledge organisations) with vested interests in growing the landscape of non-proprietary OA initiatives, and OA experts who have deep knowledge in the histories and theories of scholarly communications. Ultimately, the OBC is an interdependent and mutually reliant community of persons and organisations all devoted to bibliodiversity and the long-term sustainability of high-quality OA academic books and long-form scholarship. 


Header image: Photo by Maksim Shutov on Unsplash.

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