Open access, open infrastructures

"COPIM (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs) is an international partnership of researchers, universities, librarians, open access book publishers and infrastructure providers. It is building community-owned, open systems and infrastructures to enable open access book publishing to flourish.

Open access book publishing stands at a crossroads: one avenue leads to the monopolisation of open access by large commercial publishers and for-profit intermediaries, with infrastructures and funding systems set up to serve those businesses and their approaches; the other opens up a more diverse, scholar-led, community-owned, and not-for-profit publishing ecosystem that enables smaller and more community-focused presses to thrive and multiply.

COPIM is a project dedicated towards supporting these second sets of possibility. It is guided by the principle that publicly-funded research must be openly available to a global readership and a global authorship, without technical or economic barriers. It therefore aims to move away from a model that prioritises the working practices and interests of large-scale, commercial publishers and service operations, to a more horizontal, cooperative, and knowledge-sharing approach, governed by the research community and open for widespread participation by scholar-led and non-profit publishers. We call this ‘scaling small’...."