 Hello, my name is Judith Fatala and I'm speaking to you today from The Cobain Project. That stands for Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs, specifically about one of our major outputs, which is called the Open Book Collective. And the title of this talk is Open Access Monographs for Teaching and Research, Equity and Diversity Beyond Book Processing Charges, and you can see some of my contact details right there. I work for both Lancaster and Coventry on this project. So as many of you will be aware, we're seeing a lot of moves, for the most part, which is welcome, towards an open access landscape for books, including the work of Plan S and Coalition S, and the fact that, as of January 24, the UK's major funder, UKRI, will require monographs, book chapters and edited collections to be open access within 12 months of publication. We're seeing a lot of new university presses and scholar-led publishers emerge on the landscape, at least some of whose output is open access, and also various large-scale OA book schemes, such as Knowledge and Latched. But as happened with Knowledge and Latched, there is a danger here that the takeover and monopoly by commercial companies of open access spaces and commons will lead to excessive book processing charges by a handful of major companies, in line with the processes of platform capitalism, or the takeover and monetization of OA spaces, and you can see Coventry's full statement on some of the problems of the corporate takeover of OA at the link there. So very briefly, what are some of the problems with book processing charges, or paying to publish books open access, be that the author or their funder? Firstly, it's equitable. Academics with secure long-term funding at wealthy institutions are more likely to get published, which leads to an entrenchment of academic hierarchies that already exist, a lack of opportunity, and a solidification of fields. It supports commercial monopolies. As I mentioned, there is a danger of the OA landscape being taken over by a few major commercial players, there being less diversity, fewer publishers will survive, and poorer value for many that everyone involved in the supply chain. While there are other ways of funding in OA books, including institutional support or freemium models, these are kind of unreliable and make it hard for publishers to plan for the future. So what the Open Book Collective provides is an alternative way to go about OA publishing for small to medium publishers. We're bringing together publishers, publishing service providers and research institutions who are committed to a different kind of vision for open access, a more sustainable future for OA book length and long-form scholarship. And what we offer in a nutshell is a not-for-profit collective and platform where libraries can find, assess and sign up to a range of high-quality open access packages from diverse publishers and all members will have the opportunity to be involved in the collective's governance. So we're committed to setting core values, including the care and curation of high quality academic books, bibliodiversity, collaboration and resource sharing, rather than competition, networked community building and assistance over profit-driven centralization, horizontal working relationships over hierarchy, and safeguarding accessibility to and reuse academic books for a global readership. So how will it work? Well basically we'll work from the left-hand side here. Publishers and service providers offer membership programs via our collective and platform. Libraries sign up to what they would like to support and I'll tell you a little bit more about that in a second. The platform will generate quotations. Publishers and service providers receive membership income last fees and I want to state here that the OBC is a charity, it's not for profit, it is only generating the income to sustain itself. And libraries receive public recognition of support for OA publishing as well as other benefits such as annual reports and I'll tell you a bit more about that in a moment. So there's going to be a choice of flexible subscription packages that libraries can sign up to or they can make individual publishers and schemes or the entire collective. So we'll support the publication discovery and distribution of OA books and make it very easy for OA books to be delivered to libraries. So librarians have told us that this can be a problem sometimes due to for example a lack of reliable metadata which all our books will be funny finished with. This is called a library membership model and it has been used previously but we are building on this and expanding on this by offering not one package but many for libraries to easily compare and assess and build and or build a bespoke one. So it helps publishers if status library membership scheme if they don't have one it makes the catalog and metadata functions fully available to anyone and it massively assists and time saves for librarian in easily assessing OA content for local and global relevance and comparing the offerings for different publishers in one place. So this is just indicative content here. It's a pretty quick preview of what the platform website is going to look like. If you scroll down from the first page it'll look like that. You can see the different options to take action for different kind of stakeholders. You can see the pages for library members to build their quotation here at the selection of some publishers and service providers. So this is going to be extremely time-saving and convenient for librarians and make it easy for them to demonstrate local value to their budget holders. That's something that librarians in developing the OBC have told us is very important to them because quite often they have funds to support open access but there's such a confusing array of options that they don't know where best to invest them. Again the OBC is guaranteed to remain non-profit. It cannot be taken over by commercial interests and will always be governed by its community. All members will have opportunity to be fully involved in governance. So if you'd like to connect with us and get involved you can see that I am the research and outreach officer for Work Package 2 which is producing the open book collective. There's my email. You can see the addresses for our European contact and our US contract and our Twitter address at Open Book Collect. The Work Package 2 leads are Dr Joe Deville at Lancaster and I enjoy the Founding Director of Punkerton Books. You can also see all of Cobam's outputs at the addresses provided as well as Arzanodo or you can sign up to the OBC mailing list which we definitely recommend you do to get the most recent updates by simply scanning the code provided. Thank you very much and please do get in touch with me if you have any questions or would like to know more.