COPIM Libraries & Publishers US Workshop, May 13, 2020

illustrations

How can libraries and publishers shape the future of Open Access books

A COPIM community-workshop in collaboration with University of Michigan, Lyrasis, and ScholarLed

Participating stakeholders:

external: University of Michigan, Michigan Publishing, Lyrasis, Middlebury College Library, Wayne State University Libraries, University of Iowa, Iowa State University, Kelvin Smith Library, University of Minnesota, Macalester College, Case Western Reserve University, Oberlin College (plus other institutional representatives who have chosen to remain anonymous in project outputs)

internal: Open Book Publishers, Lancaster University, Mattering Press, punctum books, Coventry University, Open Library of the Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London, Open Humanities Press

➡️🔍🖺 Documentation available here: WP2 Workshop in Partnership with University of Michigan, MPublishing, and Lyrasis

Overview:

COPIM (Community-Led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Monographs) is a 3-year project funded by Research England and Arcadia, that will develop and build the critical underlying modular components to support the sustainable publication of open access (OA) books, including infrastructures, business models, governance procedures, re-use strategies, preservation structures, and outreach programs. These systems and infrastructures will be open and collectively managed for the common good. Towards this end, COPIM aims to develop a significantly enriched not-for-profit and open source ecosystem for OA book publishing that will support and sustain a diversity of publishing initiatives and models, particularly in humanities and social sciences publishing.

Project aims:

COPIM intends to set up an open, community-led and controlled platform for libraries and presses to support one another, a structure which we want to develop together with the community of stakeholders (academics, publishers, librarians, researchers, and knowledge managers) that will be involved in and will be supporting and relying on the infrastructures, workflows and systems that COPIM will create for open access monographs. We want to emphasize horizontalist and cooperative knowledge-sharing endeavours between communities of professional-public academic practice.

Workshop aims:

This was the first workshop in a series of three, and the first of two US-focused events.

As with the other workshops, the outcome of this workshop will be the establishment of a working group for (a) the long-term development of a consortial library funding platform, and (b) the identification and fostering of library-publisher experiments and projects that emphasise horizontal and cooperative knowledge-sharing between stakeholders (e.g. librarians, publishers, and researchers).

The workshop is organized around the following three themes:

  1. What do libraries want to achieve by supporting Open Access books/infrastructures?

  2. What financial models might best support the integration of Open Access books into libraries?

  3. What governance structures and practices are required to ensure the sustainability of these efforts?


Header image by Roman Kraft on Unsplash.