Open Books need Open Bricks

This poster shows how open infrastructures interoperate to support Diamond OA book publishing.

Scholarly book publishing has seen an accelerated transformation towards open access publishing and business models over the past couple of years, and particularly to Diamond OA publishing. Some presses have swiftly adapted and adopted the models of this new reality, while most have been wondering or even questioning how to get started.

Existing revenue streams, systems, and workflows don’t translate well to Diamond OA book publishing which is a roadblock to emerging initiatives. New solutions are needed for funding, editorial and metadata management, distribution, archiving, and usage monitoring of open access books. In the era of open scholarship, publishers must change their workflows and practices which can be difficult and challenging. The good news is, that robust, efficient, and Diamond open infrastructure solutions exist that support publishers throughout the publishing process and that these solutions are collaborating to ensure interoperability and provide a smooth and coherent workflow to meet individual publisher needs:

• For funding (Open Book Collective),
• For editorial and peer-review management (Public Knowledge Project – OMP),
• For metadata management and dissemination (Thoth Open Metadata),
• For file hosting and distribution (OAPEN)
• For discoverability (DOAB – Directory of Open Access Books), 
• For archiving (CLOCKSS and Portico via OAPEN; Thoth Open Archiving Network via Thoth Open Metadata),
• For usage monitoring (OPERAS &  COKI).

The poster visualises how the above infrastructures connect and support Diamond OA book publishing. It exemplifies this support through a concrete use case: Netherlands University Presses (https://nups.nl/). These Dutch university presses are jointly developing workflows and practices based on support from the Diamond open infrastructures. The use case may inspire other publishers or publishing partnerships in Diamond OA book publishing.

To learn more, scan the QR code in the poster or visit linktr.ee/oapenbooks.