What a difference a year makes: An update on the Open Book Collective’s activities over the past 12 months | OBC Information Hub

by Joe Deville, Kevin Sanders, and Francesca Corazza

Just over a year ago, on the 9th February 2023, the University of Manchester confirmed that it would support the Open Book Collective (OBC) by subscribing to our members’ Supporter Programmes. This was an important moment for the OBC team. At that point, we had been working for over three years as part of the COPIM project (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs) to research, imagine, develop and eventually launch a platform and organisation — what became the OBC — to solve the problem of how to fund and scale open access book publishing led by small to medium sized scholarly publishers and infrastructure providers. Achieving this first subscription gave us hope that our model could, in fact, be something universities would consider supporting.

We have come a long way since then. But February 2024 is an anniversary of sorts, marking a full calendar year since our first subscription, throughout which the OBC has operated as an intermediary between libraries, open publishing service providers, and open access publishers to create a sustainable and more equitable future for the publishing of books and longform scholarship. We are now working not just to secure new support for our service provider and publisher members, but to renew that support as part of the Copim community’s grant funded Open Book Futures project, with the aim of building towards full financial independence by May 2026.

This anniversary provides us with an opportunity to look back and reflect on what has been an incredibly busy and exciting first year. In this post, we would like to share some of the highlights of this work, as well as report on details of our progress, in line with our commitments to openness and transparency.