Governance by Membership: The Open Book Collective | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

by Eileen Joy and Judith Fathallah The governance of the Open Book Collective (OBC) has been designed in consultation with a wide variety of stakeholders. Over the past 2 years, members of the OBC development team and COPIM project leaders have met with representatives from the ScholarLed publishing group, university libraries, Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), Jisc, and members of the governance working group assembled by COPIM. In addition, the OBC governance team conducted research into the governance of community-focused open knowledge organizations within the landscape of scholarly communications, culminating in two reports, “Exploring Models for Community Governance” and “Towards Better Practices for the Community Governance of Open Infrastructures.” Our consultations and research have informed us every step of the way as we have developed a governance model that has been uniquely tailored to the mission of the OBC. Our key concern is that the governance of the OBC is membership-shaped, community-led, democratically representative, equitable, and transparent. Most paramount is that the OBC is and always will be directed and managed in accordance with the key values of the COPIM project and that it can never be co-opted by for-profit entities. The Open Access (OA) landscape has been encroached upon by ‘platform capitalism’ (Srineck 2016), whereby for-profit companies operating in both similar and different areas expand, converge, and monopolize in order to extract, redeploy, and capitalize upon the increasing centralization of data and data-based platforms. We’ve seen this occur in the academic publishing world more largely (such as with Clarivate’s acquisition of ProQuest) and within the OA landscape in particular, with the acquisition of Knowledge Unlatched by Wiley, bepress by Elsevier, and F1000 by Taylor and Francis. COPIM’s statement on the corporate acquisition of OA infrastructure can be found here. [...]