Open Book Publishers (OBP) is an open access academic book publisher based in the United Kingdom. It is a non-profit social enterprise and community interest company (CIC) that promotes open access for academic monographs, edited collections, critical editions and textbooks in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Mathematics and Science. All OBP books are peer-reviewed.All OBP titles are open access, and are available in free editions in PDF, HTML and XML formats on the publisher's website, and a number of platforms including Google Books, Worldreader, OpenEdition, DOAB, The European Library and Europeana. Some editions are hosted on Wikiversity in socially editable format, e.g. In the Lands of the Romanovs: An Annotated Bibliography by Anthony Cross (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2015). Readers in developing countries can access OBP titles using e-readers and 2G mobile phones via Worldreader. Open Book Publishers is a partner in the COPIM project, building not-for-profit community-owned, open infrastructures to enable open access book publishing to prosper. OBP is a founder member of ScholarLed, a collective of not-for-profit, academic-led, open access book publishers. It is also a founder and co-ordinator of the Open Access Books Network, a free and open network for anyone interested in open access books.g.g.
The recent partial acquisition of a university press by Taylor and Francis provoked strong reaction from some quarters and walkouts by academic editors at the press. This case, however, fits into a much broader set of interrelated questions about the role, the marketable 'brand', and the very identity of the university press in the 21st Century. In this article, we situate the case of this acquisition in these wider debates around university governance, the usefulness of the 'commercial' vs 'non-profit' dichotomy, the flow of revenue from libraries to publishers, and the lack of awareness by many researchers around their rights as authors. We also elucidate the case for good, participatory governance and more transparency around governance as safeguards for the longevity, efficacy, and reputation of institutional publishing.
The Copim perspective on Sustainability
2The Copim community welcomes the update on UKRI open access policy and fund for books.We are a group of librarians, publishers, publishing service providers, and academics committed to collectively reimagining and reconfiguring the funding and circulation of open access (OA) books.We particularly welcome that the update confirms that 'Diamond' OA schemes are eligible funding recipients.Diamond OA publishing models are those that do not require fees from either authors or readers.The Copim community includes many Diamond OA publishers, alongside colleagues and organisations working to increase funding for Diamond OA publishing through more collective funding approaches.The explicit recognition and institutionalisation of the importance of Diamond OA publishing to the future of the scholarly ecosystem marks an important moment in the history of open research in the UK.It will aid various parts of the Copim community, including participants in the Open Book Futures (OBF) project, helping them to adapt their workflows to accommodate the policy, which now includes funding to make diverse longform outputs (including books, chapters, and edited collections) openly available.The update has prompted significant discussion in various on-and offline spaces within UK higher education.Given we are highly invested in such issues, we thought it would be helpful to make some of our own discussions public.We hope this can feed into conversations within the open research community, as well as potentially into the further refinement of funder policies.In this response we provide three distinct contributions.The first includes a collectively authored reflection from members of Copim's ongoing OBF project and examines the general implications of the policy for Diamond OA book publishing.This is followed by two more sector-specific analyses from OBF project partners: from Lancaster University Library, which is playing a key role in the OBF project, and from Open Book Publishers, a leading UK-based Diamond OA book publisher.
