1 November 2020
COPIM (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs) officially began its work one year ago on 1 November 2019. Funded by Research England and Arcadia Fund, COPIM is an international partnership of researchers, universities, librarians, open access book publishers and infrastructure providers who are building community-owned, open systems and infrastructures to enable open access book publishing to flourish. The project is funded for three years.
Major Outputs
During the first year of the project, COPIM has established a solid foundation in collaborative research, infrastructure development, project management, and outreach and community building. Successfully adapting our approach to face a set of unforeseen challenges, we have fostered engagement with librarians, publishers, authors, technology providers and the general public, bringing together key experts and those interested in learning more about scholar-led not-for-profit OA book publishing.
COPIM’s work packages have predominantly engaged in community building and collected research data, conducting landscape studies by means of several scoping reports and consulting stakeholders via workshops and participation in external events. All of this is in preparation and support of the infrastructures, the pilot cases, and the governance and preservation structures that will be developed in Years 2 and 3 of the project.
The main results achieved during COPIM’s first year include:
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the publication of two major scoping reports, comprising:
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the WP3 Scoping Report Revenue Models for Open Access Monographs, published in September 2020, which provides a concise analysis of the open access economic models in use today in scholarly publishing;
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and the WP5 Scoping Report Building an Open Dissemination System, published in July 2020, which discusses the distribution of books via the traditional library supply chain and new forms of digital dissemination before looking at metadata in depth, with metadata creation and types being investigated in order to form a number of key recommendations for WP5;
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the organisation and documentation of eleven workshops engaging with more than 120 national and international stakeholders from the UK, the US, Africa, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe to establish communities on a variety of overarching open access book-related topics;
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the initial setup and continuous further development of an Open Dissemination System, a resource to make open access book metadata available in an open and transparent way, which will integrate into the larger Open Dissemination System, to be developed in Years 2 and 3.;
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the launch of an innovative revenue model to fund open access monographs at a traditional scholarly publisher: Opening The Future. Building on library subscription initiatives like those in use at Open Book Publishers and punctum books, this is a sustainable OA publishing model being piloted as a COPIM case study in partnership with the Central European University Press;
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and the setup and iterative extension of a set of Outreach and Dissemination activities that are combining a variety of channels including social media and open community platforms.
In addition to the workshops organised by COPIM, the team has also supported and contributed to events and workshops held by external stakeholders and organisations working towards shared goals (following the previously mentioned principle of ‘scaling small’). These organisations include:
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Invest in Open Infrastructure‘s Future of Scholarship project;
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Knowledge Futures Group‘s Community Summit;
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and the Open Access Books Network platform.
COPIM has also set up new collaborations to build innovative forms of open online community events, evident from the team’s work with the Coko Foundation in creating the Open Publishing Fest. In two exciting weeks that were filled with more than 150 events, Open Publishing Fest allowed COPIM members and the larger scholarly communications community to discover new formats to share their ongoing work with a more global audience, and presented an opportunity to expand COPIM’s community to those not only working in scholarship but also in open source software development, open government, and the arts.
Summary graphic here
Read the full Annual Report here