Working across communities to ensure an open future for books: views from Copim's Archiving & Preservation team | Digital Preservation Coalition

by Dr Miranda Barnes

The Open Book Futures project, which began in May 2023 as an acceleration and advancement of the COPIM Project (11/2019-04/2023), continues to focus on the open access monograph, with an emphasis on Scaling Small. This principle “eschews standard approaches to organisational growth that tend to flatten community diversity through economies of scale” (Adema & Moore, 2021). Work Packages in both projects focus more broadly on infrastructure, governance, accessibility, financial models and revenue, metadata and dissemination, and experimental publishing, but also archiving and preservation. It is the combined approach and multifaceted, collaborative interaction of the work packages that leads to our best insights and outputs.

Both COPIM and Open Book Futures depend on the breadth of different groups and individuals involved, which includes scholars, librarians, publishers, infrastructure providers and advocacy groups, as well as colleagues in a variety of other roles at the universities and institutions involved in the projects. Without the perspectives, knowledge, and support of the many members of this "community of communities” (Adema, Hart, et al, 2022), any impact made by our work would be isolated and siloed. Our research into community-supported options for archiving and preservation is no different. We gain a great deal from knowing what challenges face the academic author, the scholar-led press, and the libraries wishing to support the open research agenda. Our understanding is buoyed and clarified by our conversations and collaborations with digital preservation archives, infrastructure providers, and platforms, allowing us to develop and advance tools and guidance to benefit those who need it most. And without organisations such as the DPC, Jisc, OAPEN, and DOAB, and the collective expertise and experience they share, certainly our community and efforts would be greatly diminished.

Another important community we have been engaging is that of other projects examining similar issues from different perspectives, such as the work of the Embedding Preservability Project, and its predecessor Enhancing Services to Preserve New Forms of Scholarship, both led by New York University Libraries. This project specifically considers the challenges to long-term preservation of “increasingly complex publications that are not easily represented in print.” Also the Software Preservation Network’s EaaSI, or Emulation as a Service Infrastructure, who have built a platform with preservation potential for the most complicated published works that may depend on a virtual machine to render properly. Connecting and meeting with our colleagues within these projects has been immensely beneficial, particularly for project members working on experimental publishing and digital preservation. This is just one example of the collaborative, cooperative spirit pervasive within our “community of communities” that has come to define open research.

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