Community-building in action: The Open Access Books Network

This talk will focus on the Open Access Books Network, an international community that brings together researchers, publishers, librarians, and anyone else interested in open access books. Launched in September 2020 and coordinated by representatives of DOAB/OAPEN, OPERAS, SPARC Europe, and ScholarLed, the OABN has quickly grown to include over 300 members. We stage talks and workshops, share knowledge and best practices, and bust myths about open access books—and all this during a global pandemic, when community exchange has been challenged as never before and the vulnerabilities of closed systems of knowledge-sharing have been starkly exposed.

This paper will present an overview of the activities of the OABN, sharing the techniques we used to create a strong and enthusiastic community built around the idea of openness, and the strategies with which we have aimed to narrow the gap between researchers and the OA books community at large. As well as fostering a thriving digital hub on Humanities Commons and an extended community on social media, we have organised opportunities to share and learn from each others’ experiences using digital events, workshops, and video resources, including:

1. the OA Books Workout series where researchers share their creative open book publishing stories in live, recorded, and written formats
2. a mythbusting resource where experts address common myths and challenges related to open access publishing frequently faced by researchers
3. talks from scholar-publishers, such as Jeff Pooley of mediastudies.press and from the team at COPIM, who are building infrastructure to support small-scale, academic-led OA publishing
4. and our most significant series so far Voices from the OA Books Community, which gathered 476 registrants in total to explore different aspects of policy for OA books. We heard from researchers, publishers, funders, OA policymakers, librarians, and infrastructure providers from all over the world to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of different policy outcomes for OA books from a broad range of perspectives. SPARC Europe synthesised these discussions and we took the results to cOAlition S, who have subsequently recognised the OABN as “an open forum for community input during the implementation process” of their recommendations for OA books. This series proved that the research community can come together to help shape the future of OA books, and that a community like the OABN can be a powerful way to make that happen.

The OABN brings together the OA books community at large, including researchers in their respective roles as book authors, publishers or simply OA enthusiasts. By sharing the growth of the Open Access Books Network from an idea discussed between colleagues to a thriving community-based network, we hope to inspire others at LIBER to develop similar Communities of Practice that bring researchers together in groups related to their own interests and ambitions for the future of scholarly communication.