The Copim Perspective on Community-Led | Copim

Adema, J., Barnes, L., Deville, J., Fathallah, J., Gatti, R., Hughes, A., Hopkins, K., Sanders, K., & Steiner, T. (2024). The Copim Perspective on Community-Led. Copim. https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.cc2195f3

For the second year in a row, International Open Access Week has chosen as its theme ‘Community over Commercialisation’. This emphasis, despite the outpouring of engagement last year, indicates how complex and unresolved the topic is. 

A number of stakeholders consider ‘community’ through a number of lenses; many publishers make claims to earnest and meaningful engagement with the academic community who make up their authors, while many open access or open infrastructure organisations (including our own) make claims to community engagement or to being community-led. Meanwhile, many libraries judge (some) OA initiatives on aspects including community governance and/or non-commercial ownership. But what does it actually mean to be community-led?

Copim Open Book Futures has centred ‘community-led’ from the very start of the project in 2019 – in fact, it is the ‘C’ that begins the acronym of our name. It is a subject close to our hearts and often on our minds. It is also a concept that was articulated at an early stage in our project, and which has continued to be a fundamental part of it to this day.

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