There was a strong Copim presence at the UKSG 48th Annual Conference and Exhibition, from active members of the Open Book Futures project, to members of the community of like-minded people and organisations who collaborate with us on community-led and values-driven initiatives. We’ve summarised their contributions in the table below, before going on to reflect on the event from the perspective of our various infrastructures.

Copim Community (and Corner)

Not only is UKSG a fantastic chance to make new connections, discuss the issues affecting the sector, propose solutions, and of course progress in-person conversations, it is also a rare opportunity for the Copim team to meet face to face. We’re scattered far and wide across the UK and throughout mainland Europe and the USA - but several of us converged on sunny Brighton despite the usual public transport chaos for anyone coming from northern England (what #levellingup?!).

We shared a stand with OAPEN and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), and despite our best attempts to get a stand near to the Open Institutional Publishing Association (OIPA), had to content ourselves with being opposite Overton (excellent merch - wild seed flower bombs and multi-port chargers). Talking of merch, as expected, the Thoth stickers and Thoth/tote bags were incredibly popular. We still have some left though - if you’re UK based, catch us at DCDC in July. 

Many thanks go to the UKSG organising committee for adding our social evening ‘Copim Corner’ to the official programme and for the reminders via the Whova app and the loudspeaker announcements. And to think we were worried we’d just be sat in the Mesmerist pub on our own - in the end it was the biggest turnout ever, with colleagues from libraries in attendance, along with publishers, consultants, platform providers and book sellers!

Considerations and observations

The groups representing Copim Opening Book Futures at UKSG - the Open Book Collective (OBC), Opening the Future (OtF), Thoth Open Metadata and Accessibility - share their highlights and key takeaways from UKSG.

Open Book Collective

A key takeaway was how important it is for us to advocate collectively for a community-led, Diamond OA future, underpinned by open, interoperable publishing infrastructures. We did this in our collective Copim stand, which also featured Thoth, OtF, OAPEN/DOAJ, as well as flyers for Open Journals Collective – a newly launched organisation that we are collaborating with closely. We also did it in our panel on Diamond OA publishing [slides available on Zenodo]. In introducing his talk, Rupert Gatti -- co-Director of both Thoth and Open Book Publishers -- talked about how important it is to support this collective ecosystem of Diamond OA publishing. “No one cares about the longevity of a mayfly [...] it’s the population that’s important". While individual OA initiatives are of course important in their own right, the bigger issue is: is there an ecosystem -- including potentially funders supporting Diamond OA, libraries having dedicated OA budgets, and OA initiatives acting in collaborative, inter-operative ways, across national boundaries -- that can support the broader ambition to deliver a fairer and more sustainable future for Diamond OA? At UKSG, we saw signs of what this ecosystem could look like, providing solutions both for books (e.g. DOAB/OAPEN, Open Book Collective, Opening the Future, Thoth Open Metadata) and journals (DOAJ/Open Journals Collective). However, this is really just the beginning. The Diamond OA ecosystem, like many ecosystems, is fragile and in urgent need of support, from a wide range of stakeholders.

One question from the session was from a librarian highlighting how difficult it is to assess/monitor etc lots of different Diamond OA initiatives. Of course this is easy for all-dancing commercial platforms with massive budgets to support shiny outreach efforts, but is difficult for independent, not-for-profit interoperating initiatives and infrastructures - so some help e.g. from others active in the field of scholarly communications (such as librarians) to demonstrate which values-based initiatives are important in their view, and how they interact with them – as e.g. the Open Investments page curated by KU Leuven Libraries – would be tremendously useful to boost our collective efforts. This gives us a good opportunity to position our various Diamond OA offers, made available by our publisher and infrastructure provider members, as a coherent and vital collection - to be supported as a complete collection rather than piecemeal.

Opening the Future

This year, UKSG was most useful for the conversations in-between sessions. Chance encounters along with planned meetings led to fruitful discussions with libraries from Ireland and Austria, as well as colleagues from university libraries at Teeside, Reading, Lancaster, York, Sussex, Leeds and many others. We also met with presses and providers like JSTOR, Project MUSE, Fulcrum, Amsterdam UP, the Scottish Universities Press, MIT Press, OIPA and the OLH.

Budget cuts were of course a recurring concern in most (all?) meetings but we didn’t detect an air of doom and gloom. Perhaps it was the blazing sun over Brighton beach but colleagues, by and large, seemed tentatively hopeful that the dire state of HEI finances in the UK and USA (and to a lesser extent Europe?) might be something of a tipping point: shining a spotlight on every pound, euro and dollar and forcing budget holders to really consider where dwindling financial resources are best spent. And the overriding feeling we got was that the library sector is no longer able (or, perhaps, willing) to continue to sustain exorbitantly priced commercial deals that deliver a lavish return to shareholders while leaving a big hole in library budgets.

With library budget cuts of £51m in the UK alone we were told at UKSG that something has to give whether partners and colleagues want it to or not. The challenge now, of course, will be for the sector to translate this feeling into real action: convincing academic colleagues and administrators that this money could be better spent on sustaining open infrastructures and open funding models - infrastructures that are not beholden to increasing bottom lines and delivering shareholder value year on year. Where our work on OA books fits into this picture is complicated: we don’t pretend that ‘saved money’ (if there is any) will just be funnelled to OtF or other OA funding models. But we can emphasise that we work in genuine partnership with libraries, we have a library Advisory Board and regular conversations with members - in other words we are better aligned with libraries than with large commercial players. (Though there is a financial angle to this too: supporting a Diamond model of publishing like OtF is always better value-for-money, clever reinvestment and good stewardship of funds.)

One major hurdle we heard about and which we’d like to discuss more and help where we can was that cancelling unsustainable deals will be painful, there is no getting around that - so how can we help libraries through that bumpy period? This may be a topic we can return to in the summer - perhaps organising an informal workshop or similar if the community would find it helpful.

Making the case to academic colleagues for divesting from bad deals and investing in better open, cheaper deals will be a very important part of the puzzle. There is an opportunity here to position - and to fund - OA as a serious alternative to investments that feel increasingly like a toxic relationship.

Thoth Open Metadata

Thoth received some really nice shout-outs at UKSG, particularly from OIPA members – for which we were very grateful – reinforcing the point above regarding the importance of collectively recognising the collective. This then reinforces the size, importance and impact of the whole community. 

We encountered a lot of interest in Thoth services from collectives of publishers looking to Thoth as a way of providing cataloguing and dissemination services to all of their members - including the provision of usage metrics via the OPERAS Metrics service. This is an important use case Thoth will be developing further in the coming year.

A commentator in one session noted how important broad open access distribution is in an era of technical and political disruption of infrastructures. Reflecting on lessons from the British Library hack, one take-away is the realisation that having content broadly distributed and accessible removes the single-point vulnerability problem and also mitigates against the danger of the forced removal of content from individual repositories - thus ensuring knowledge remains accessible even if individual delivery mechanisms fail.

Accessibility

Accessibility was addressed in the plenary panel focusing on neurodivergency, mainly promoting the work of NLISN.org but also considering the accessibility needs of neurodivergent students, researchers and librarians. UKSG is a strong advocate for all Equality Diversity and Inclusion issues that impact on scholarly communications, and this was a brilliant platform to open up discussions in this area. As a panel we received some excellent feedback across the padlet we set up, in person after the session and via email afterwards. We were mentioned in this write up of the conference that highlights the key theme of inclusivity and belonging. 

For the Open Book Futures Accessibility work package, the key takeaway was reinforcing the understanding that moral and ethical motivations for providing accessible content were a stronger driver than legislation - to provide belonging there are many considerations beyond those legal minimums that the scholarly communications community are enthusiastic about delivering.

Epilogue

We're feeling cautiously optimistic about the future. There was a great buzz of people around our stand and a real feeling of community-in-action with colleagues sharing best practice as well as libraries pledging financial support. But to meet the ongoing challenges of financial cuts to HE and current geopolitical realities, we need to continue these conversations and make constructive and meaningful progress across all stakeholder groups.

Header photo credit: Yeshi Kangrang via Unsplash