Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

Total value of project

The Research England Development Fund award covers £2,202,947 of the project’s total budget, which also includes £576,537 in partners’ own contributions. Further to that, COPIM is supported with a grant of £800,000 from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. In sum, this amounts to £3,579,484.

Project team 

Janneke Adema, Javier Arias, Lucy Barnes, Sherri L. Barnes, Emily Bell, Gareth Cole, Joe Deville, Martin Paul Eve, Judith Fathallah, Eelco Ferwerda, Rupert Gatti, Elli Gerakopoulou, Vincent van Gerven Oei, Tom Grady, Gary Hall, Eileen F. A. Joy, Marcell Mars, Julien McHardy, Samuel Moore, Izabella Penier, Dan Rudmann, Ronald Snijder, Tobias Steiner, Niels Stern, Graham Stone.

Partners

Coventry University (Lead); Birkbeck, University of London; Lancaster University; Trinity College, Cambridge; Loughborough University Library; UC Santa Barbara Library; Open Book Publishers; Punctum Books; The Directory of Open Access Books; Jisc.

Collaborators

ScholarLed (incl. Mattering Press, Open Book Publishers, Open Humanities Press, Meson Press, Punctum Books), The British Library, The Digital Preservation Coalition

Duration of project

01/11/19 - 31/10/22

Project overview

COPIM is an international partnership of researchers, universities, librarians, open access book publishers and infrastructure providers. It is building community-owned, open systems and infrastructures to enable open access book publishing to flourish.

Project objectives

COPIM will develop a significantly enriched not-for-profit and open source ecosystem for open access book publishing that will support and sustain a diversity of publishing initiatives and models, particularly within the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), in the UK and internationally. The project aims to:

• Remove hurdles preventing new and existing open access book initiatives from adopting open access workflows by 1) building open-source, community-based infrastructures that support the publication of open access books, and 2) establishing and consolidating partnerships between HE institutions and open access book publishers.
• Develop consortial, institutional, and other funding systems – building upon the partners’ existing network of 240+ libraries internationally—that will 1) serve as an important hybrid community-led revenue models for open access book publishers, 2) support the establishment of more community-owned and governed infrastructures, and 3) promote publisher-librarian partnerships around open access book publishing.
• Showcase alternative (non-BPC) business models that incorporate infrastructural innovations and/or cost-reductions through streamlined operating processes, production workflows and economic efficiencies—which would benefit all scales of publishing initiatives.
• Support the creation of, interaction with, and reuse of open access books in all their variety and complexity (including emergent and experimental genres), most importantly by ensuring that these complex digital research publications can be archived effectively.
• Achieve knowledge transfer to stakeholders through various pilots that will 1) enable COPIM’s technical, organisational, financial and relational innovations to scale both horizontally (to other presses) and vertically (to other partners, including universities, libraries, and funders) and 2) inform and support (future) funder requirements for open access books.

• Impact statement

  The project consolidates existing relationships among the partners into a major strategic collaboration that will enhance the impact of research internationally. At the same time, COPIM promotes a community-based approach for the collaboration of academic institutions and industry stakeholders. Finally, it develops innovative approaches for knowledge exchange activities to facilitate sustainable and workable transitions to an open publication ecosystem for monographs and to ensure a diverse ecology of publishers

  COPIM will benefit the general public and the economy by maximising the dissemination and impact of world-leading research. The adoption of COPIM’s infrastructures, business models, preservation structures, and governance procedures, will enable economic sustainability and enhanced capacities, at smaller and larger scales, for open access books. It will offer Higher Education institutions and Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences researchers sustainable publishing models they control, increased publishing options, and cost-reductions to build a more horizontal and co-operative knowledge sharing community.

• Outputs

  As part of seven connected Work Packages, COPIM will work on:

  1) integrated capacity-building amongst presses;
  2) access to and development of consortial, institutional, and other funding channels;
  3) development and piloting of appropriate business models;
  4) cost reductions achieved by economies of scale;
  5) mutually supportive governance models;
  6) integration into library, repository, and digital learning environments;
  7) the re-use of and experimentation with OA books;
  8) the effective and robust archiving of OA content; and
  9) knowledge transfer to stakeholders through various pilots.

• Additional information
  • Project website
  • Project blog & documentation site
  • @COPIMproject