Open Access Week 2022: How to run a major international project with a mini carbon footprint | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

by Livy Onalee Snyder and Lucy Barnes Open Access Week’s theme, “Open for Climate Justice,” reflects the necessity for more equitable knowledge structures across international communities in order to tackle the environmental and societal extremes we are currently experiencing. From the outset, the COPIM project has had community at its heart, with our belief that open access — which one might, in its ideal form, think of as knowledge made available by and for a global community — is essential and that the infrastructures that support it should be owned and governed jointly by the academic, library and publishing communities, rather than by single (often commercial) organisations. We believe that community-led approaches might power big changes in open access academic book publishing. Consequently, rather than approach this year’s OA Week theme by writing about the benefits of open access to climate research (although we believe they are many and powerful) we decided to think about the impact of community action on climate change, and particularly to focus on our own small community: the group of people who have been working intensively on the COPIM project since late 2019. COPIM is a major international project that has spanned years and continents, and yet we have run almost the entire project remotely, greatly reducing our carbon footprint in the process. In this blog post, we share some perspectives from members of the team who have made that happen: the benefits, drawbacks and lessons learned, as well as the more surprising experiences and outcomes that have come from this daunting and rich experiment in building and collaborating together, apart.