U.S. Library Outreach Workshop, Open Book Collective | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

by Livy Onalee Snyder and Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy As a community-led organization, the Open Book Collective regularly solicits advice and counsel for its development from the communities it seeks to serve. As university librarians are critical to the financial and other forms of support for open access and open source initiatives (such as publishers and infrastructure providers), they have been involved from the beginning of the OBC, from initial brainstorming to the processes of forming the collective — its values and principles, membership, governance, business model, web platform, and so on. Now that we are nearing the launch of the OBC, we are conducting a new series of workshops with librarians in order to get some further assessments from them regarding what we have built. It should be noted, first, that not only will the OBC always be seeking guidance from libraries as it launches and moves forward, but that librarians will have a major role to play in the governance of the collective as well-meaning, librarians are not just our consultants; they are building the collective with us. In our most recent workshops, we have been asking librarians for their thoughts and advice on the criteria for membership within the OBC, its governance model, its offerings and business model, its community standards, its technical aspects, its web platform, or any other aspect of the OBC they want to discuss that we haven’t thought of in advance. [...]