Copim Connects: Developing an Information Hub for the open access book community | Copim community

Hughes, A., & Hopkins, K. (2024). Copim Connects: Developing an Information Hub for the open access book community. Copim. https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.af5dd841

We all know that there are a great number of resources, guidelines, and toolkits for open access monographs out there … Some are now out of date or no longer regularly maintained; others have been developed in the last few years to reflect new developments and practices, and there are also new ones in development as part of other open access projects. But how do we know what actually exists, which ones we should be using, and which ones are reliable, will be maintained and updated by trusted sources AND be sustainable?

One of the deliverables of the Open Book Futures project is to establish a ‘knowledge base’ (or equivalent) to provide comprehensive resources on alternative funding models and modes of publishing, acquiring and archiving open access books, alongside new training and guidance on archiving and preservation best practice. The deliverable states that we will (a) develop resources for stakeholders, (b) consolidate existing resources, (c) promote business models best practice, and (d) showcase project work on metadata, experimental publishing and archiving. By providing a comprehensive tool suite of resources we will accelerate outreach to libraries, publishers, academics and the wider public, to advocate for, advise on and encourage open access publishing and initiatives. 

But as we’ve stated above, we know that this area is super-crowded and confusing for the community - the last thing we want to do is add to this! So what are we going to do to meet our deliverable / funder requirements and provide a valuable asset to support publishers, and the wider community, in the development of the OA books landscape and underpin a sustainable future for OA books publishing?

We want our offering to be unique and add value efficiently. In order to do this, we realised that there were broadly three areas we needed to think about as early as possible in the process of planning our ‘knowledge base’:

• the issue or challenges we want to address,

• the resources and assets we might be able to draw on, along with any risks that we could identify, and

• initial plans and timescales.

Our scoping report is the first step in this process. Drawing on the myriad of resources we know exist (produced within and outside the OBF project), it presents an overview of existing assets and guidance for OA book publishing, a gap analysis, and our initial recommendations for the OBF working group to consider, all of which will be used to scope the direction and final format of the ‘knowledge base’ (henceforth referred to as an ‘InfoHub’, although the final name is still to be determined).

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