Library Support for OA Books: The German perspective
Participating stakeholders:
external: OPERAS-P, open.access-network, Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg, Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT), Universität Regensburg, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft, Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB), Technische Universität Berlin, Universität Duisburg-Essen, Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Sächsische Landesbibliothek (SLUB), Open-Access-Büro Berlin, Universität Konstanz
internal: Open Book Publishers, Coventry University, Lancaster University, Jisc
➡️🔍🖺 Documentation available here: Library Support for OA Books Workshop: the German perspective
Overview:
The workshop is co-hosted by COPIM, open-access.network, and OPERAS-P projects.
COPIM (Community-Led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Monographs) is a 3-year project funded by Research England and Arcadia, that will develop and build the critical underlying modular components to support the sustainable publication of open access (OA) books, including infrastructures, business models, governance procedures, re-use strategies, preservation structures, and outreach programs. These systems and infrastructures will be open and collectively managed for the common good. Towards this end, COPIM aims to develop a significantly enriched not-for-profit and open source ecosystem for OA book publishing that will support and sustain a diversity of publishing initiatives and models, particularly in humanities and social sciences publishing.
COPIM intends to set up an open, community-led and controlled platform for libraries and presses to support one another, a structure which we want to develop together with the community of stakeholders (academics, publishers, librarians, researchers, and knowledge managers) that will be involved in and will be supporting and relying on the infrastructures, workflows and systems that COPIM will create for open access monographs. We want to emphasize horizontalist and cooperative knowledge-sharing endeavours between communities of professional-public academic practice.
Open-access.network project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research to create a new information and networking service on the topic of open access and to promote exchange with the research communities on this matter. Central goals of the project are to improve the provision of information, the imparting of skills and the networking of the existing community.
The new platform is intended to develop and refine the existing information platform open- access.net. To this end, the project partners will create new services like a discussion forum, help desk, moderated focus groups, and new databases on central topics. Networking between researchers and the open access community will be advanced with thematically focused workshops, web events, and other interactive formats.
OPERAS-P project supports the OPERAS Research Infrastructure by furthering the development of the infrastructure in view of achieving the necessary scientific, technical and community maturity. The key objectives of the OPERAS-P project are the following:
- Produce the necessary documentation defining OPERAS’ strategy and implementation to support the ESFRI application.
- Support the preparation phase of the infrastructure by implementing a legal framework, a governance and support the implementation and coordination of services.
- Prepare a long-term, evidence-based strategy for the development of the infrastructure and its services
- Ensure outreach and advocacy for open scholarly communication in social sciences and humanities, developing a communication strategy on the infrastructure and supporting the expansion of the consortium, and enhancing innovation for the future of scholarly communication practices in social sciences and humanities.
Workshop aims:
The outcome of this workshop will be the establishment of a working group for (a) the long-term development of a consortial library funding platform, and (b) the identification and fostering of library-publisher experiments and projects that emphasise horizontal and cooperative knowledge-sharing between stakeholders (e.g. librarians, publishers, and researchers).
The workshop consists of a theoretical part, aiming at a better understanding of the national-specific issues surrounding collective funding for OA books from a library perspective and a practical part in which a proposed model for collaborative funding for OA books is discussed.
Header image by Oh-berlin.com on Flickr.