Looking to a more equitable future: the institutional repository as digital monograph archive for the small and scholar-led press

Traditionally, institutional repositories within the UK have had the primary purpose of recording and archiving the research outputs of their own academic researchers and making these open access wherever possible. Most often the outputs are published scholarly articles, book chapters, books and monographs. As the landscape of academic research continues to evolve, this has broadened to include grey literature, research data, creative works, and documentation of methods and processes. In most cases, these are still solely the work of an institution's own researchers, but in some instances, this is changing.  

Institutional repositories have become publishers (often as part of the Library), as well as locations for storing conference proceedings for conferences held by the institution, along with a variety of other innovations. As concerns of equity, equality, fairness and knowledge sharing become ever-higher priorities for the academic sector globally, what future roles might repositories play in ensuring the protection of all contributions to scholarly knowledge?  

As open access monographs are increasing in number due to funder policies and the global push for Open Science, small and scholar-led publishers are at risk of permanent loss if anything disrupted their servers or current storage options, or they cease to operate. While larger publishers of OA monographs are financially secure enough to pay for digital preservation, often these smaller presses have no financial support, limited staff resource and technical expertise. This long tail of publishers is left in an inequitable position of risk and the loss of their publications would be detrimental to our knowledge landscape.  

Thoth (COPIM/Open Book Futures) is building a bespoke, open-source system, the Thoth Archiving Network, that will allow push-button deposit the OA digital monograph files and metadata from small and scholar-led presses within participating university repositories. Several university repositories in the UK and the USA have already agreed to participate, with many others interested. This work is part of Work Package 7 (Archiving & Preservation) of the Open Book Futures project, advancing the earlier work of the COPIM Project. Our programmers have been working on interoperability with several of the main repository software systems (EPrints, DSpace, and Figshare) using their existing APIs and metadata schema, as well as via application of the SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) protocol.  
 
In November 2022, as part of COPIM we ran a workshop with UKCORR to gauge interest in participating in the Thoth Archiving Network among members, as well as openly discuss barriers to doing so. Approximately 20 attendees representing various organisations and instututions attended this first session. Key points of discussion were around institutional content policies for repositories, technical challenges, issues of governance and decision-making, copyright and licensing, workload and potential cost.  

We wish to share our progress, findings, and ongoing work on the Thoth Archiving Network the wider UKCORR community, to introduce the Network and to gain beneficial feedback, queries, and networking opportunities to further the purpose of protecting these essential contributions to knowledge.