Community Governance Explored | COPIM

As part of our research on governance for the COPIM project, we (Sam and Janneke) are currently undertaking a landscape analysis, initially based on desk research. For this analysis we are looking at the kinds of organisational structures different projects and institutions in the scholarly communication and publishing space (ones that focus on open access publishing and open infrastructure, or whose mission is close to COPIM’s), use to govern their efforts. By examining the disparate approaches to and best practices around governance that are being employed in scholarly communication, we hope to understand how best to devise our own horizontal governance systems for the infrastructures and workflows COPIM is currently developing to support open access for books. In the next stage of our research, we will continue our exploration by additionally looking at various grassroots and activist organisations outside the scholarly communication space that are engaged in experiments with community governance that might be of interest to COPIM. We hope this will help inform our project in creating the durable organisational structures that we need for the coordination, governance and administrative support of the project’s community-owned infrastructure.

But what actually is governance and how is it currently used in the scholarly communication space? Although our research is still ongoing we would like to share some first reflections and observations.

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