International, Scholar-led Collaboration around Community-led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Monographs

In this presentation, we will share an overview of an international, multi-institutional, 3-year project focused on building Community-led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM), recently funded for £3.5 million by Research England, the Arcadia Fund (UK), and the partners: Birkbeck, University of London, Coventry University, the Digital Preservation Coalition, Jisc, Lancaster University, Loughborough University Library, ScholarLed, and University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) Library. COPIM comprises 6 “work projects” that are rooted in the firm conviction that, in order for open access publishing initiatives to thrive, we have to develop more robust definitions of “open” that go beyond releasing content from behind paywalls. It pilots a range of interventions, from developing open, transparent, sustainable, and community-governed infrastructures for the curation, dissemination, discovery, and long-term preservation of open content and open data, to following the best practices for integrating open content into institutional library, digital learning, and repository systems, as well as devising new revenue models for sustaining OA book publishing at various scales. ScholarLed believes it is vital to ensure that the mechanisms used by OA publishers are driven by, and responsive to, the varied needs of an international scholarly community, and a key aspect of COPIM is that it privileges close working relationships between publishers, librarians, and other knowledge managers.