‘‘Scaling Small’: A strategy to support open access book publishing

Officially launched November 1, 2019, Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) is an international, multi-institutional, 3-year project that intends to transform Open Access (OA) monograph publishing by delivering significant improvements to the infrastructures used by publishers, and by developing the best practices for transitioning nonprofit, academic, independent and scholar-led publishers to OA. Funded for £3.5 million by Research England and the Arcadia Fund, the project has been designed to enable smaller non-profit publishers in the Humanities and Social Science to publish OA books and get them into the existing distribution channels and library systems.Towards that goal, COPIM 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 existing repository systems, as well as devising new revenue models for sustaining OA book publishing.The COPIM project uses the “Scaling Small’ approach as its main strategy for enabling presses in the Humanities and Social Science to transition to Open Access. This approach involves creating an environment in which a large number of nonprofit publishers of whatever size, with a variety of business models, can sustainably transition to Open Access at a manageable cost through a collaborative effort.As a founding partner, the UCSB Library has been participating in the COPIM project since its inception, focused primarily on efforts to develop COPIM’s open publication ecosystem's governance procedures for monographs and create durable organizational structures for the coordination, governance, and administrative support of the project’s community-owned infrastructure.In this presentation, the author will discuss the UCSB involvement and will lay out the philosophy of the project as a whole, giving attendees valuable insight into a major new initiative supporting scholar-led OA for books