DPC joins new project on open access publishing

The DPC is partnering in a new project funded by Research England which has been set to help universities, researchers, libraries and publishers to make more, and better, use of open access book publishing. It will enable greater access to world-leading research and increase its impact.

Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) is a partnership led by Coventry University with the DPC and also consisting of:

• Birkbeck, University of London, Lancaster University and Trinity College, Cambridge 
• The ScholarLed consortium of established open access presses (Open Book Publishers, punctum books, Open Humanities Press, Mattering Press, and meson press) 
• University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) Library and Loughborough University Library 
• Infrastructure providers the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and Jisc

The Digital Preservation Coalition will enable knowledge exchange with the global digital preservation community, ensuring that open access publications which are the focus of the project are made resilient beyond the limits of the infrastructure through which they are created.

"Published Research Outputs are explicitly listed as ‘Endangered’ on the Global ‘BitList’ of Digitally Endangered Species," notes Executive Director of the DPC, William Kilbride. "That’s a call to arms which the project – indeed all publishers – will have to address though design of a preservation ready infrastructure."

Research England has awarded £2.2 million to COPIM from the Research England Development (RED) Fund, which supports innovation in research and knowledge exchange in higher education that offers significant public benefits.

COPIM will transform open access book publishing by  moving away from a model of competing commercial operations to a more horizontal and cooperative, knowledge-sharing approach. This will involve:

• Improving and innovating in the infrastructures (business models, preservation structures, and governance procedures) being used by open access book publishers and by those publishers making a transition to open access books 
• Enabling more productive collaborations between librarians, publishers, researchers and others involved in the open access landscape 
• Expanding opportunities by creating open source toolkits to develop the skills necessary to run open access publishing operations.

It will support and sustain a diversity of publishing initiatives and models, particularly within the Humanities and Social Sciences, in the UK and internationally, offering universities and researchers sustainable publishing models they control, increased publishing options, and cost reductions.