Seeding for a not-for-profit community-led OA books ecosystem

Within the Copim community, we have long been convinced that there is untapped potential for collaboration and problem-solving between the many non-commercial open networks and infrastructures that now exist to support open access books (which they do in different ways, and sometimes as part of a broader remit).

Particularly during the last two to three years, and building on the foundational work done in the wider area of scholarly communications by e.g. Lewis et. al., 2018 and Maxwell et al., 2019, the groups involved in Copim have begun mapping and outreach work to try to identify the networks and infrastructures that are specific to OA books, with an understanding that this work should happen collaboratively, and together with interested, like-minded people and initiatives. We want to bring these networks and infrastructures together to identify key challenges our communities face related to OA books, and how we might begin to address these collectively. This post will introduce that work and our aims.

Background

As part of our collective outreach work within and beyond the Copim community, many of the initiatives involved — including the Open Book Collective (OBC), OAPEN, DOAB, Jisc, and Thoth — have been in touch with an ever-increasing number of like-minded open infrastructures such as Invest in Open Infrastructures (IOI), OAeBU DT, SCOSS, Educopia, the African Platform for Open Scholarship (APOS), and the OPERAS community (to name but a few) over the years.

Begun during the first phase of the COPIM project, and continued as part of an internal Open Book Futures hybrid workshop1 that took place in The Hague and online in October 2023, our larger group engaged in an initial mapping exercise to scope the institutions, initiatives and projects that each of us had been working with since the kick-off of COPIM in 2020, and in which contexts these collaborations had been developing.

A flurry of activities to open up participation

Initially intended as a small-scale exercise, this quickly grew into a rather unwieldy Miro map, so we decided to transfer the collected data points into an interactive data visualisation via Kumu.2

However, the limitations inherent in such a mapping exercise became apparent rather quickly, as such a mapping only represents the perspectives of those involved in contributing to the mapping.

Hence, to arrive at a fuller, more granular picture that also takes into account different regional foci to amplify bibliodiverse and equitable, community-led approaches to OA book publishing, the team sought to approach the matter in a phased, iterative fashion. More data collection and mapping exercises were organised and this work is ongoing via workshops and conversations with other infrastructures, reaching out beyond the Copim community.

Meeting with like-minded infrastructures

Following the initial scoping exercise, we invited like-minded initiatives to contribute to the map, which resulted in two recent iterations: Colleagues from OAPEN and OBC revisited the ‘Towards Sustainable Open Access Book Publishing in the African Context’ workshop that took place in Cape Town in February 2024 (cf. Fathallah & Deville, 2024) to collect more data points specifically from African stakeholders.

A few weeks later, a larger group, including colleagues from Thoth, OAPEN, OBC, and OABN organised a workshop as part of the OPERAS 2024 conference, to extend an invitation to the European OPERAS community to come together and engage in a lively discussion of the mapping.

But we also went a bit further than that!

As well as providing more input into the mapping itself, the workshop also sparked a wider-ranging (and ongoing) conversation about how horizontal collaborations might be nurtured to address shared challenges. This was done in the spirit of encouraging greater communication and collaboration to work towards our shared common goal of an equitable, community-led and bibliodiverse OA book ecosystem.

Here, the visual mapping exercise served to highlight the manifold connections already existing between multiple infrastructures across Europe and beyond, including (but by no means limited to) those involved in Open Book Futures and many other networks, projects, and initiatives within OPERAS such as OAPEN/DOAB, the Open Access Books Network, and the PALOMERA project. We also invited participants to think about what is currently still missing on that map?

More specifically, the workshop raised questions of how we might work together to expand and further develop the plurality of common open infrastructures, networks, and resources that are needed to deliver a future for OA books led not by large commercial conglomerates, but by communities of scholars, small-to-medium-sized institutions as well as scholar-led publishers, not-for-profit infrastructure providers, and scholarly libraries.

Topics discussed included the possibility of identifying joint deliverables that could be achieved via cross-initiative collaborations, focusing on open-source and community-owned implementations, while also thinking about potential sources of funding to support this kind of ongoing work, and how to expand the reach of this collaborative effort to stakeholders outside of Europe. We also reflected on infrastructures that are not chiefly technical in nature, but that bring people together for the purposes of shared work—with OPERAS being an excellent example.

Moving towards a dedicated OPERAS Working Group

One idea that has come up again and again in a variety of discussions, and which was also seen favourably by the OPERAS conference workshop participants, was to draw on the power of a more closely-aligned collaboration via what was then tentatively called an “Open Infrastructure Alliance”.

This approach would, in the longer term, seek to bring together like-minded, open, not-for-profit infrastructures active in the world of OA book publishing, scoping if the variety of open services offered by each of the involved initiatives might

• on the technical level make it easier to interoperate through each initiative’s open protocols / APIs;

• and on a more social level consider linking those services to put the collective in a position to be able to offer a more overarching portfolio of services that might be relevant to e.g. funders, but that none of the individual entities might be able to offer alone.

Particularly during the last year, conversations have multiplied, with a variety of presentations and workshops, e.g. on research evaluation (Deville et al., 2024), research information (Steiner et al., 2024), and different foci on regional specificities of OA book publishing (Fathallah & Deville, 2024; Sanders, 2024; Fathallah, 2024; Steiner et al., 2025) co-organised by the Open Book Collective, OAPEN, and Thoth. Much of this was done with the underlying motivation to approach interested stakeholders in a more concerted fashion, and to highlight the powerful potential of what we see as an interoperable, interconnected network of infrastructures, with corresponding open services that we are seeking to establish through our collaborative work in the different arenas we are collectively engaged in.

In parallel, and building on the momentum that was felt by the team following the positive feedback received from participants during the OPERAS conference workshop, a group of representatives from a variety of open infrastructures was invited to collaborate on a joint proposal to formalise the inception of a dedicated OPERAS Working Group that would focus specifically on open and not-for-profit infrastructures for OA books. This foundational proposal, which had initially been circulated as a shared googleDoc, has in the meantime been uploaded to Zenodo — at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15166501 — for easier referencing.

The proposal was submitted to the OPERAS Executive Assembly in late summer of 2024, and the motion was subsequently approved to form a Working Group within the newly-created OPERAS Open Access Books Special Interest Group (SIG).

Fast forward to 2025, and the OA Books SIG now serves as an umbrella to bring together the manifold activities relevant to open access book publishing that have been developing under the roof of OPERAS for quite some time.

New year, new SIG … and a new Working Group

Right on the back of the new OA Books SIG’s kick-off meeting, the first Open Infrastructures Working Group meeting was held on March 07, 2025. More than 20 international stakeholders had initially signed up to participate in the first meeting, and judging from the lively feedback and engagement received, there indeed seems to be much interest in collaborations between open infrastructures.

In the coming weeks, the Working Group will seek to build on the early scoping exercise, and engage with stakeholders to continue the data collection process by maintaining and further developing the interactive Kumu map. The map will serve as a central tool to further engagement and outreach between open, community-focused infrastructures on an international scale to develop new collaborations and, potentially, new ideas for future OPERAS services that might be particularly suitable to support community-led OA book publishing, including Diamond OA for books, and be of interest to diverse stakeholders including publishers, funders, authors etc.

This will include engagement of all interested stakeholders from within the OPERAS Assembly of the Commons and outside the current OPERAS network to identify the key challenges that still prevent collaboration between open infrastructures that support OA books, and to explore opportunities to work together to address these: for example, opportunities to address and extend the recommendations provided by the PALOMERA project.

As was agreed during the first meeting, subsequent Working Group meetings will be held roughly every six weeks, with the next iteration being scheduled for April 25, 1pm (BST) / 2pm (CEST).

Now, if this sounds like something you, dear reader, would like to become engaged in as well, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with Kevin and Toby (via [email protected] and [email protected]), who will be happy to add you to the Working Group’s mailing list.

Header image by Jamie Steel on Unsplash.