Open Book Futures Final Project Report: Addressing the Infrastructure, Funding, Workflow and Equity Challenges in Open Access Book Publishing

This report documents the work of Copim’s Open Book Futures project (OBF; May 2023 – April 2026). The project focused on expanding and diversifying the work of community-led open access (OA) book publishing, including developing new ways to significantly increase and improve the quality, quantity, discoverability, accessibility, funding, and archiving of openly available academic content. This was done with a wider ambition in view: to put in place the solutions and workflows that we have argued are required to ensure that longform academic content is not locked away behind paywalls, only accessible to the individuals and institutions with the means to pay for access.

One key aim during the life of this project was to scale and deepen the impact and scope of the open access book publishing initiatives and research that began with the preceding COPIM project (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs; November 2019 – April 2023). As we detail in the report, OBF succeeded in radically transforming many of the infrastructures and practices that underpin long form open access book publishing. A particular focus throughout was on supporting ‘Diamond’ open access publishing, in which neither authors nor institutions are charged direct fees tied to individual publications.

The project had six objectives, and we discuss how we met each in a corresponding Chapter of the report. The objectives were: 

1. Enhance the impact of COPIM initiatives
2. Bridge the infrastructure gap
3. Incubate and financially support open access initiatives
4. Enhance engagement with the wider open access publishing ecosystem
5. Foster bibliodiversity
6. Support emerging open access books policy guidance 

Each Chapter is then divided into specific Sections, covering different areas of our work. The six Chapters are followed by a series of Appendices, including information requested by the Research England Development Fund in its reporting template. 

A number of the project impacts were above and beyond those we set out to achieve at the start of the project. We have: 

• Generated major new funding streams from libraries and library consortia (£2million+), which has helped enhance and expand the work of open access book publishers and infrastructure providers on an international scale, leading to more open access books being published, which are better supported, more widely disseminated – and thus, by extension, being found by more readers across the world.
• Significantly impacted small and medium sized publishers’ metadata management and book dissemination work, including enhancing their books’ discoverability and global reach, and improving the quality of their book metadata.
•  Ensured the post-project financial independence of the two Copim-launched organisations – Open Book Collective and Thoth Open Metadata – as well as custom sustainability solutions for the Opening the Future Revenue Model, the Experimental Publishing Compendium, and the Thoth Open Archiving Network.
• Directly influenced the development of the Open Journals Collective, a new sibling organisation to the Open Book Collective, which has already generated over £1.5million to support Diamond open access journal publishing.
• Engaged in extensive global outreach, including organising a high-profile final project conference and close to 50 other events, actively participating in 270 in total, publishing 17 reports and over 220 blog posts/opinion pieces, and achieving over 25,000 downloads of our archived project outputs.
• Transformed Copim into a globally engaged, self-sustaining community, deeply valued for its expertise and activities, as well as extending Copim’s networks to involve many new stakeholders in Africa, Europe and Latin America.
•  Impacted the development of policy, both national and within libraries, especially in the UK, Netherlands, and Switzerland, to provide significant new support to Diamond open access publishing, underpinned by a wide range of policy recommendations and detailed policy advocacy, as well as supporting early open access policy development in Ethiopia and Nigeria.
• Impacted publishers’ accessibility practices, in relation to both their ebooks and platforms, and as well as making a strong case for the importance of more deeply integrating questions about accessible content into discussions about the purpose and benefits of open access.
• Supported enhanced bibliodiversity in the open publishing ecosystem by significantly expanding the number of non-UK/US/anglophone publishers working with Open Book Collective and Thoth, as well as by developing new multilingual platform options, new platform features to support multilingual metadata, and awarding 7 capacity building grants to open book publishing initiatives, mostly in Lower and Middle Income Countries, while also directly supporting under-resourced publishers that would otherwise not have had the means to disseminate and archive their open access titles.
• Delivered major upgrades to the open publishing and funding infrastructures we have developed, including launching new dissemination capabilities, new useability and workflow enhancements, new forms of interoperability with other open infrastructure services.
• Impacted the archiving and preservation practices of publishers and university libraries, both via the Thoth Open Archiving Network and through new open archiving criteria, new resources and toolkits, underpinned by a series of evidence-based assessments of archiving challenges for longform publications.
• Highlighted the benefits of experimental forms of longform open access book publishing, for publishers, authors, and the wider sector, as well as successfully documenting a range of new experimental publishing workflows, trialled across three highly innovative pilot projects.
• Assembled a new National Libraries Network, which helped support a new set of recommendations for how to better integrate open access books into National Libraires, as forming the basis for a new community of practice.
• Developed a wide range of new resources – including toolkits, reports, best practices, and case studies, many hosted on our new Copim Compass hub as well as archived on our Zenodo repository – that have already benefited, and will continue to benefit, the publisher, library and open infrastructure communities.