New infrastructures for Open Access books: a platform and invitation

The Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs is a collaborative project bringing together an international range of researchers, universities, librarians, open access book publishers and infrastructure providers (www.copim.ac.uk). I present here the project of Work Package 2: to build and maintain a collective and platform required to promote, sustain and distribute open access academic book publishing.

The Open Book Collective will be a consortium that supports a user-friendly, integrated platform to help stakeholders explore, discover, access and support OA books from a range of leading publishers and infrastructure providers searchable catalogue. Maximally readable, comprehensive metadata will be provided by Thoth. We aim to offer a choice of flexible subscription packages, through which patrons can choose to support individual publishers and schemes, or indeed the entire collective. Whilst our major stakeholders will be librarians and publishers, the catalogue and metadata functions will be freely available to all. We will also be providing space for OA publishers to display their current and forthcoming books and access library revenue streams that may have previously been unavailable to them.

We have partnered with the group of publishers that form the ScholarLed collective, with whom we are piloting the platform, but are building with the aim of flexible expansion to include more publishers in time. We have also partnered with JISC and DOAB, who are assisting in the management of revenue, curation and systems of preservation. This presentation introduces the work we have done so far and invites attendees to join us in our process of consultative outreach as we further develop the platform.