What might it mean to do scholarly publishing in a ‘sustainable’ way? In this post, we provide some insights on how Copim is thinking and working through this question.
This is part of a series of posts on four key Copim concepts: Community-led, Scale, Sustainability and Bibliodiversity. Each post will be linked to the others once it is published.
What might it mean to do scholarly publishing in a ‘sustainable’ way? In this post, we provide some insights on how Copim is thinking and working through this question, opening up some of the different ways in which sustainability can be understood in the context of academic book publishing, and open access (OA) publishing in particular. We suggest that as well as financial sustainability, further dimensions of sustainability should also be considered, and are too often overlooked: sustainability as related to communities, relations, and labour. We conclude by reflecting on whether discussions of sustainability in scholarly publishing could benefit from being coupled to discussions about how to achieve ‘resilient’ systems for scholarly communication.
Introduction
Sustainability is a multivalent term, particularly as applied to organisations. As Brun et. al write in a recent report for the DIAMAS project on the sustainability of diverse Institutional Publishers and Service Providers (IPSPs) in Europe, which is worth quoting at length:
The complex nature of the term “sustainability” is already reflected on a linguistic level, as it has different connotations in different languages. Take the Croatian and Serbian “održivost”, German “Nachhaltigkeit”, Finnish “kestävä”, Swedish “hållbar” or French “durabilité”, for example. Some terms relate to long-term survival without clear ideas of independent sustainability, whereas others imply durability and persistence. Others focus on living without resource depletion or harm to the respective ecosystem (Brun et. al 2024, p.9).
How, then, might some of the different connotations of sustainability apply in the context of OA book publishing?
The most frequently discussed aspect of sustainability in OA publishing is financial: the ability for an organisation to continue its operations, if not to diversify and develop them, ‘preserving the essence of an entity while adapting to ever-changing circumstances and sometimes unexpected external influence’ (Brun et. al 2024, p.9). Even here, we may encounter a diversity of perspectives on what level of turnover makes an organisation sustainable – for example, is a fund to cover unexpected expenses or hard times a necessity, or is an organisation financially sustainable if it simply breaks even? Does profit have a role to play in sustainability?
We suggest that these questions, vital though they may be to an individual organisation, are too narrow to constitute in themselves a thorough exploration of what ‘sustainability’ means in the context of OA book publishing. Four other dimensions of sustainability should also be considered:
An understanding of financial sustainability considered in the context of community;
Relational sustainability, in terms of the organisation or processes’ effects and interactions with other organisations or actors within an ecosystem;
Sustainability of labour, volunteer, or paid;
Sustainability and its relationship to resilience.
Sustainability and community
At the level of finances, it might seem intuitive that an organisation is considered sustainable if it is able to continue its operations in an inevitably uncertain economic climate (the POSI Principles offer one way of defining this aspect of sustainability).
However, within Copim, we are interested in creating sustainability not just for an individual organisation, but for a community of diamond OA book publishers, as well as for the infrastructure providers providing essential services to support OA publishing. The essential aspect of one of our core strategies, ‘scaling small’, is that it describes the growth of an ecosystem of organisations that work collaboratively: not acting as individuals in competition with each other in a quest for individual sustainability, but developing relationships, building infrastructures and sharing knowledge that can support the flourishing of a resilient ecosystem in which different communities can thrive. These communities in turn should support individual organisations to be born, flourish, and grow (or not, as they choose) at their own pace. Some individual initiatives may decide, after a time, to cease their operations – in which case, the archiving and preservation aspects of Copim’s work become essential to ensure that these initiatives’ outputs remain accessible even though the individual organisation might have disappeared – but the aim is for the community of publishers and service providers to continue to strengthen and develop. This is a dynamic process, which also provides room for the kind of experimentation and innovation our Copim colleagues are practicing and piloting in the Experimental Publishing group, including new workflows, technologies, and redefining the idea of the ‘book’ as product and process.
This vision of sustainability does not simply mean ‘growing’ or ‘expanding’ individual presses and service providers, but rather, working towards a networked and interconnected sustainable ecosystem for OA books, in line with the philosophy of scaling small. Copim is contributing to this vision in different ways, including via two collective funding models: the Open Book Collective (OBC) and Opening the Future (OtF). One of the aims of both of these models is to eliminate the need for the Book Processing Charge (BPC) as a route to fund OA for books, replacing it with collective contributions by libraries.
As Copim has previously argued, the BPC model is unaffordable for many authors, funders, and research organisations, meaning that, while it may be considered a sustainable model by individual publishers to fund their OA output, it is not sustainable for the research dissemination system as a whole. (This is an aspect of sustainability that we discuss further in the section below: ‘Relational Sustainability’.) Even for publishers, however, BPCs are not an easily predictable source of income: they are irregular and often depend on the priorities of funding agencies. BPCs represent a model that treats OA book publishing as an expensive and occasional ‘add-on’, rather than the systemic way that books are published – the opposite of a sustainable system.
In place of this occasional and burdensome funding model, we are building networks and platforms that enable OA book stakeholders to work together towards a better and fairer landscape for OA books. For the OBC, a charity registered in the UK, the funding model involves sourcing renewable annual payments from libraries to support the OA work of its publisher and service provider members. It retains a small portion of this revenue to cover its operating costs.
Fig. 1: Logo of the Open Book Collective
However, the OBC is not simply a neutral financial intermediary. This can be seen in two of OBC’s key features: its Collective Development Fund and its community-led governance structure. A narrow definition of sustainability for the OBC might mean generating enough income for its publisher and infrastructure provider members to continue their operations at the level they deem appropriate, while also paying OBC’s costs – and this is indeed important. But the OBC has wider ambitions, as exemplified by the launch of its Collective Development Fund. The aim of this Fund is to support publishers, infrastructure providers, and other organisations or groups who align with the OBC’s values to build capacity to increase the quantity, quality, and diversity of OA books. It is supported by the agreement of the publisher and infrastructure provider members of the OBC to pay 5% of the money they receive from libraries via the OBC platform into the Fund, and applications are open to all – not just to members of the OBC. In this way, in line with its charitable remit, the OBC contributes to the sustainability, broadly conceived, of the OA books ecosystem as a whole.
The OBC’s community governance is another practical expression of this broader conception of sustainability. The libraries who collectively fund the OBC are its custodians, with a strong role in its governance, including the ability to appoint, and if necessary potentially remove, OBC’s Trustees or ‘Stewards’. This underscores the principle that the relationship between presses and libraries should not simply be the potentially extractive association of customer and service provider, but that of community members involved in a collective enterprise. This approach also gives funder libraries a different kind of ‘stake’ in the ongoing life of the OBC, and it enables the OBC to be more responsive to what libraries and their universities want, because they sit on the OBC’s General Assembly of Custodians and on the Board of Stewards.
Fig. 2: The OBC’s governance model
Likewise Opening the Future, a funding mechanism that embeds into existing publishers, has engaged in community building by creating a library advisory board. This helps us to gather library feedback on how the model works, what libraries perceive the benefits of participation to be, how we can make sure that these are clearly outlined for prospective library members, and other topics. By doing this, we are trying to make sure that the model works for the libraries who support us, as well as for the publishers with whom we have far more regular contact in the ordinary course of our work.
Fig. 3: How Opening the Future works
Or, take the work of another Copim infrastructure, Thoth Open Metadata. Thoth’s main aim is to provide a service without charge – i.e. the provision of Thoth’s open metadata management platform – for the benefit of the community of presses that use it. Thoth is currently working to establish different income streams to support this central work, which in turn are useful for publishers as they help them navigate the complex landscape of book dissemination, discoverability, and archiving, while also enabling publishers to keep their independence and freedom to choose to move to other services if they wish. One of those income streams comprises Thoth’s added-value services (dissemination, hosting, metadata creation), which generate income by publishers paying Thoth to, for example, disseminate OA book content and metadata to a variety of platforms on their behalf. Thoth’s second income stream is via the Open Book Collective: Thoth is a Service Provider member of the OBC. It is funded by libraries to ensure that OA publishers’ valuable outputs can be found, disseminated, and archived for future generations. In line with the POSI principles, the latter income stream is currently building a financial buffer that could, if needed, support Thoth’s core operations for a full year.
Fig. 4: Logo of Thoth Open Metadata
Going beyond the pragmatic necessity of establishing longer-term income streams to support Thoth’s operations, Thoth is also engaging in community and advocacy work. This includes bringing together like-minded infrastructures, collaborating with many others within the Copim community and beyond towards establishing a joint ecosystem of open infrastructures with a particular focus on OA book publishing.
Relational sustainability
This commitment to the role of community as an integral part of sustainability might also be considered in the light of ‘relational sustainability’. This refers to the way one stakeholder or entity within an ecosystem interacts with that ecosystem’s other elements, and to the need to consider not just the sustainability of those individual elements but also the relations between these elements.
To return to the example of Book Processing Charges (BPCs): an expanded OA landscape that depends on BPCs is not sustainable for the scholarly system – neither for libraries nor funders, nor for academics who must spend an increasing amount of time competing for the money to cover them. This is why both the Open Book Collective and Opening the Future aim to supplant this prevailing model with a more holistic one, where it is publishers’ activities that are supported, rather than individual outputs. As Brun et. al note, in discussions of sustainability, it is important to think carefully about what, exactly, is at stake:
It is above all, vital to know the object or unit of sustainability in our institutional publishing context, i.e. do we speak of a journal, a publisher, a business model, or a broader publishing ecosystem(p. 9).
Our focus within the Copim community is on this broader publishing ecosystem, which includes publishers of different sizes and types alongside libraries, service providers, funders, universities, researchers, etc.
This broader focus also keeps bibliodiversity in view, ensuring that different presses can operate at the level at which they feel comfortable, without needing to grow and dominate in order to thrive. For example, collectively, the OBC is able to generate income that would be impossible for the individual presses. Our OtF model also helps to connect smaller publishers with libraries who might otherwise have struggled to form these relationships, enabling these presses to begin flipping their frontlist to OA in a gradual and sustainable way. This again embodies the principle of ‘scaling small’, and demonstrates that it is a system that develops and prizes sustainability: the infrastructures that we are building support the growth of a community of presses and service providers, and an increase in the number of OA books, without imposing an undue burden on other parts of the research ecosystem (e.g. libraries, funders).
Sustainability and labour
An organisation or process cannot be sustainable if it depends on volunteer labour at a level that is impossible or unfair to workers. This is particularly relevant to scholar-led publishing operations, many of which are run entirely by very few or even one person, often working full time in other roles, often as academics. Because the systems that recognise and reward academic labour in many national contexts do not properly recognise and value the labour of publishing as academic labour (in all its aspects, from solicitation of manuscripts to editorial work to dissemination) this work is often done in addition to full time contracted hours at an institution, which in reality are often already more than full-time work as it is. In an ideal world, the systems of academic recognition and reward would properly value the labour of publishing, but as it stands, academics including those tenuously employed or at the start of their career are often juggling this work with the demands of teaching and publication in officially ‘ranked’ and/or visible outlets, for the sake of pursuing job security. A recent article by present and former Copim colleagues Janneke Adema and Samuel Moore (2023) takes a closer look at this issue, and calls for proper acknowledgement of the volunteer work done by scholars in the context of universities’ allotment of work hours to different task areas – acknowledgement that need not necessarily be financial.
We may also need to understand how OA publishing is connected to various forms of precarious and marginalised labour. As Copim colleague Joe Deville (2024) has written about, colleagues working for OA publishers often do so despite either occupying precarious roles within universities or working outside of institutionalised academia as so-called ‘para-academics’. Discussions of sustainability in OA publishing need, therefore, to recognise how this relates to the various forms of precarization and exclusion that higher education creates. Indeed, Deville notes, drawing on the work of Reggie Raju and Jill Claasen (2022), this extends globally: the work of scholars in the Global South is often rendered marginal by a publishing system that routinely reproduces inequalities in whose scholarship is read, published, and circulated.
The issue of sustainability as it relates to labour has always been a core concern of Copim’s, since one of the major spurs to our work was the formation of the ScholarLed publishing consortium, whose members in many cases rely on volunteer labour to sustain their operations, and our work has always engaged with questions of how to support a growing community of publishers that individually may be very small and financially lean. The infrastructures established via Copim therefore aim to provide low- or no-cost ways to a) support essential publishing activities via practical help and knowledge-sharing, thus lowering the demands on publisher time and labour, and b) to generate income streams that may be used to cover labour costs via the OBC and OtF.
For example, Thoth’s low-cost dissemination services are one way to ease the strain that small and scholar-led publishers in particular – who, as we have established above, tend to rely on volunteer labour – are facing with regards to meeting the multiple requirements needed to disseminate their books. One of the key tenets at the heart of Thoth’s operations is to shoulder the infrastructural burden of making organisational and technical connections with distributors so that individual publishers don’t have to – hence maintaining the Thoth Free service. This also includes ensuring that publishers do not have to sign up to services that will subsequently lock them into perpetual dependencies – including Thoth – thus supporting publishers’ infrastructural independence.
This also holds true for the research being conducted in the context of Copim’s Accessibility and Archiving work. Both are closely connected to Thoth, with findings from those areas informing the evolution of Thoth’s data schema.
In both work packages we have identified similar issues: small and scholar-led publishers often tend to lack the resources and in-depth expertise to properly archive and address accessibility standards in their production workflows. Initiatives such as the Thoth Open Archiving Network, and our forthcoming accessibility resources, will be particularly useful to help publishers navigate these areas.
The Experimental Publishing Compendium also aims to make more discoverable the tools that exist to support experimental publishing, and how they can be used, thus lowering the technical and knowledge barriers involved in this type of publishing.
Our accessibility work has only recently begun. Digital accessibility is a huge area that can encompass big-budget consultants, platforms and tools, and broadly the skills required to navigate it are a mixture of knowledge of technical accessibility standards, business intelligence and developer skills. We are approaching this via community co-operation, open source sharing and building in-house knowledge and expertise over the long term, providing guidance on areas such as legislation and standards, and recommendations for available open source tools that will support accessibility auditing.
Sustainability and resilience
Our vision of a sustainable OA book ecosystem is thus one in which diverse elements can flourish co-operatively, mutually aiding and enriching each other and the wider relations they are part of. Similarly, Ottina (2013) has suggested that given the volatility of our present institutional context, resilience might be a preferable term or at least a useful term to supplement sustainability, as applied to systems rather than the financial health of individual publishers or initiatives:
Resilient systems absorb disturbance, transforming when necessary to retain their essential function and identity. Resilience depends on the diversity that gives it a ready pool of responses to volatile conditions(2013, 607).
Supplementing the idea of ‘sustainability’ with ‘resilience’ helps to
segue into a discussion of what kind of scholarly communications system we want and how we can make it resilient in the face of technological, institutional and funding volatility’ (609, emphasis ours).
Ottina’s emphasis on choice and agencyare important here, because in some ways, the concept of ‘sustainability’ is unhelpful: its passive framing encourages us to think of it as something inherent to an organisation or system, and to miss the active choices involved in sustaining something. We and others can argue that the dominance of a profit- and competition-based commercial publishing system is unsustainable, and yet it is currently being sustained– albeit the enormous cracks emerging in the financing of higher education in the UK and elsewhere make this sustenance ever more precarious, while the system itself seems less and less resilient.
A significant aspect of our work in Copim is advocacy and community-building: calling on libraries and university leadership to examine the systems that they are currently sustaining at huge cost and persuading them that they could divert some of that money and choose to sustain a different way of working and publishing. There are obviously many factors that influence the decisions universities make, but we are making the case that the system we are building are designed to be resilient and equitable, and should be sustained, that to do so would contribute to the broader sustainability and resilience of OA book publishing and, ultimately, to the sustaining of more resilient AHSS disciplines that are currently facing a fight for funding and survival while their research largely remains locked away and inaccessible to most people.
Within Copim, the work of initiatives such as the OBC, Opening the Future, Thoth Open Metadata, and the Thoth Open Archiving Network put our arguments into practice. In different ways, these initiatives enable individual publishers to retain their independence and unique character whilst benefiting from the financial, technological and practical support of being part of collective funding models and shared, open infrastructures. Ultimately, we are working towards a system of OA publishing that is sustainable for publishers, scholars, universities, funders, libraries and all those engaged in the production of knowledge.
Adema, J. & Moore, S. A., (2021) “Scaling Small; Or How to Envision New Relationalities for Knowledge Production”, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 16(1), 27-45. doi: https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.918 (section on Sustainability and Resilience)
Adema, J, Moore, S. A. (2023) ‘Just One Day of Unstructured Autonomous Time’: Supporting Editorial Labour for Ethical Publishing within the University, New Formations, 2023(110 & 111 ), 8-27. https://doi.org/10.3898/NewF:110-111.01.2024
Hart, P., Adema, J., & COPIM. (2022). Towards Better Practices for the Community Governance of Open Infrastructures (1.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6535460
Ottina, D. (2013). From sustainable publishing to resilient communications. tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique, 11(2), 604–13. DOI: http://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v11i2.528
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