Open Access Monographs for Teaching and Research: A Sustainable Model Beyond Book Processing Charges

This talk introduces the work of the COPIM project (Community-Led Infrastructures for Open Access Monographs), then specifically explains the project of Work Package 2: Building the Open Book Collective and platform. The OBC will host an infrastructure and revenue management platform for the support, access, distribution and promotion of OA academic books. Monographs are still of particular importance for teaching and research in the arts and humanities especially, and OA infrastructures are lagging behind those for journal articles. The Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs is an international collaborative project bringing together a range of researchers, universities, librarians, open access book publishers and infrastructure providers (www.copim.ac.uk). One major output of the COPIM project is the Open Book Collective, which is a collaboration between librarians, scholarly publishers and OA infrastructure providers. We have developed this platform in consultation with librarians, publishers, and researchers, via a series of interactive workshops and reflective sessions. The Open Book Collective will support a user-friendly, integrated platform to help stakeholders explore, discover, access and support OA books from a range of leading publishers and infrastructure providers via high-quality integrated metadata and a fully searchable catalogue. In a bid to think beyond the Book Processing Charges that can sustain inequity in academic publishing, we will 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 everyone. We will also be providing space for OA publishers to display their current and forthcoming books. Our mission is to build and maintain an infrastructure to support the publication, discovery and distribution of OA books via a range of flexible subscription packages, and make it easy for OA books to be delivered to libraries. We have already 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, metadata and systems of preservation. In this talk, I will discuss the progress of the Collective and platform, and invite stakeholders to get involved and join us in this more sustainable and equitable model for publishing and distributing open access books. beyond inequitable book processing models