Copim response to UKRI funding mechanism for Diamond open access book models | Copim community

Adema, J., Barnes, L., Deville, J., Fathallah, J., Gatti, R., Grady, T., Hopkins, K., Kiesewetter, R., Sanders, K., Steiner, T., & Sykes, E. (2024). Copim response to UKRI funding mechanism for Diamond open access book models. Copim. https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.c70b3ff1

The Copim community welcomes the update on UKRI open access policy and fund for books. We are a group of librarians, publishers, publishing service providers, and academics committed to collectively reimagining and reconfiguring the funding and circulation of open access (OA) books.

We particularly welcome that the update confirms that ‘Diamond’ OA schemes are eligible funding recipients. Diamond OA publishing models are those that do not require fees from either authors or readers. The Copim community includes many Diamond OA publishers, alongside colleagues and organisations working to increase funding for Diamond OA publishing through more collective funding approaches.

The explicit recognition and institutionalisation of the importance of Diamond OA publishing to the future of the scholarly ecosystem marks an important moment in the history of open research in the UK. It will aid various parts of the Copim community, including participants in the Open Book Futures (OBF) project, helping them to adapt their workflows to accommodate the policy, which now includes funding to make diverse long-form outputs (including books, chapters, and edited collections) openly available.

The update has prompted significant discussion in various on- and offline spaces within UK higher education. Given we are highly invested in such issues, we thought it would be helpful to make some of our own discussions public. We hope this can feed into conversations within the open research community, as well as potentially into the further refinement of funder policies.

In this response we provide three distinct contributions. The first includes a collectively authored reflection from members of Copim’s ongoing OBF project and examines the general implications of the policy for Diamond OA book publishing. This is followed by two more sector-specific analyses from OBF project partners: from Lancaster University Library, which is playing a key role in the OBF project, and from Open Book Publishers, a leading UK-based Diamond OA book publisher.

In the spirit of openness and transparency, we would also like to make clear that the OBF project is part-funded by the Research England Development Fund, and is hence a recipient of UKRI funds. We are also funded by Arcadia.