Seeding for a not-for-profit community-led OA books ecosystem | Copim & OPERAS Open Infrastructures for OA Books Working Group

Steiner, T., Barnes, L., Fathallah, J., Findanis, J., Gatti, R., Deville, J., Sanders, K., Higman, R., Stern, N., & Stone, G. (2025). Seeding for a not-for-profit community-led OA books ecosystem. Copim. https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.d35141ca

This blog post traces the efforts undertaken during the past 24-36 months to foster collaboration between like-minded open not-for-profit infrastructures active in OA book publishing, leading to the recent inception of the OPERAS Open Infrastructures for OA books Working Group.

Within the Copim community, we have long been convinced that there is untapped potential for collaboration and problem-solving between the many non-commercial open networks and infrastructures that now exist to support open access books (which they do in different ways, and sometimes as part of a broader remit).

Particularly during the last two to three years, and building on the foundational work done in the wider area of scholarly communications by e.g. Lewis et. al., 2018 and Maxwell et al., 2019, the groups involved in Copim have begun mapping and outreach work to try to identify the networks and infrastructures that are specific to OA books, with an understanding that this work should happen collaboratively, and together with interested, like-minded people and initiatives. We want to bring these networks and infrastructures together to identify key challenges our communities face related to OA books, and how we might begin to address these collectively. This post will introduce that work and our aims.

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