 Hello, good afternoon everyone and welcome to this next session at OER 22. I'm delighted to be joined by Judith Batalla from the Copham Project who is here to talk to us about open access monographs for teaching and research, a sustainable model beyond BPC. So without further ado, over to you Judith. Please add any questions that you have for Judith into the chat. We'll have a short Q&A at the end of this session. Hello. Thank you everybody for coming. So the title of today's presentation is Open Access Monographs for Teaching Research, a Sustainable Model Beyond Book Processing Charges or BPC. My name is Judith Batalla. I'm from Lancaster University and today I'm speaking to you as a representative both of the Copham Project, which I'll explain a little more about in a second, and specifically of the Open Book Collective, which is one of the major outputs of Copham. So first of all, I should explain what Copham is. As you can see, it stands for Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs. And I've put there on the slide some of the places where you can keep up with the research on the outputs of Copham in general. We'll talk about the OBC a little bit more in a second, such as the Twitter and the website and the PubPub, where all of our outputs are freely open access. So what this is, is a collaboration that brings together a whole range of people and institutions invested in a sustainable future and an equitable future for open access. So that means researchers, universities, librarians, OA book publishers, and infrastructure providers. And by that, we mean those organisations such as DOAB and just and related platforms that provide the underpinning for these systems to work. So initially, this was a three-year project. We've now been granted an extension and hopefully there will be further follow-on funding to develop it more. By Research England and the Arcadia Foundation and from our consortium partners, the overall aim of Copham was to build, maintain, and sustain the infrastructures for open access books. So the Open Book Collective is one major output of Copham. And it brings together publishers, publishing service providers, and research institutions who are working together to enable a more sustainable future for OA book length and long-form scholarship. So what we share, obviously what different members of this collective do various, but what we share is a commitment to building this ecosystem. So in short, the offer is this is a not-for-profit collective platform where libraries can find, assess, and sign up to a range of quality open access packages from diverse publishers. And importantly, all members of the collective, be they publishers, libraries, infrastructure providers, publisher, collectors have the opportunity to be involved in governance. So at the heart of this are some core values. Firstly, the care and curation of high-quality academic books. So that means things like rigorous peer-reviewing processes, vetting of applications, which we'll talk about it a little bit more later in this drama. It goes to governance, a commitment to Biblio diversity, so not a flattening out or not a flattening out of publishers or an incorporation system, but collaboration and research sharing over co-op competition. And related to that is the idea of building a networked community over centralization and a drive for profit. Horizontal working ships over hierarchization and safeguarding open accessibility to and reuse of academic books for global readers without technological or economic barriers. So basically, if you want to be part of the OBC, we are looking for people who share these values and we've already found a lot more really helpful on building this kind of collective. And what we're specifically interested in doing is helping publishers through this platform and through the collective to move beyond book processing charges for open access. And why do we want to do that? Well, firstly, because there's this inequity built into book processing charges, so that academics with secure long-time funding at wealthy institutions are more likely to get published. And then this entrenched the established academic hierarchies leading to a start vocation of fields, lack of opportunity for new writers and new publishing houses and damages the career trajectories of younger globally diverse and more precarious staff. So it's kind of a self-reinforcing system. And that's what we want to get away from. And secondly, because book processing charges support the commercial monopolies that already exist within academic publishing. And the big danger we think as more OA mandates come into force in Britain, although we're really happy to see that, there's a danger that the open access landscape will be taken over by major commercial players, leading to lack of diversity. Fewer publishers surviving and poor value for everybody involved in the supply chain. So there are other ways of funding open access books, such as institutional support, freemium models, but they're unreliable and make it hard for publishers to plan, which is one of the things that we're hoping this collective can ameliorate. So how does it work? When we first started planning this project, we did a lot of outreach with both libraries and universities and with publishers and publishing service providers who were interested in open access. And what we found was that OA initiatives found that outreach work was labor intensive, outreach is geographically skewed, and the rewards remain uncertain, which is why BPC tends to get entrenched and there's a barrier for smaller initiatives. Meanwhile, libraries and universities are telling us that they'd like to support open access, but there's too much to choose from those inconsistencies and how these initiatives present themselves is really labor intensive to have to assess all these individual initiatives and they want more evidence of how each one is going to deliver benefit both locally to their institution and globally. So our kind of proposed not the solution, because we're not about monopolization, but a solution is that we set up the open book collective, where in libraries and universities sign up to pay a membership fee and that can include consortium memberships as well. The open book collective deals with the administration and the financial side, and then reputable publishers and infrastructure providers, which we'll talk about how that works more in a second, input metadata, input their catalogs and the membership fees are processed towards them specifically for the support of OA publishing. So why is this good value for both the scholarly community and for open access? Well, I think I just skipped something there. Hang on. No, I didn't. Right. So it's a sustainable and gradual funding model. So the initiatives are not dependent on fitting annual fixed targets, and it's an ecosystem that can grow gradually over time. It's easier to publish away. As I mentioned, there's this problem of sustainability and reliability, and we can then assist publishers in moving away from BPC. It increases awareness of away initiatives because this is an open and publicly accessible portal to enable readers, funders and institutions to easily compare the different offerings and their values contributing to the collective education that we really need within the scholarly community about open access increases diversity in OA we've already talked about, and it creates more robust infrastructures. So here's a here's the same diagram with a little bit more detail. What are the publishers putting in clear and consistent information on their packages and values? This makes this solves the librarians problem of the difficulty in assessing what is on offer from different initiatives. Tote is one of the infrastructure providers that I've mentioned here. I'll talk I think a little bit more about that later. Basically, it's an open software app that publishers put in their metadata and it standardizes them in a maximally readable way for the catalogue. And so as I say, so outcomes of this consistent metadata and information on local relevance and initiatives to institutions. Opening the future is another scheme of the coping project, which is a non-BPC publishing model supporting, for example, university press one university press two. So that's just an example of the kind of things that are going to be going into the open book collective. So now I'll tell you a little bit about the business model. So, first of all, I just want to say I'm not an expert and I didn't design this. But what you can kind of see is if we sort of to begin on the right hand side, where the publisher and the service provider offers a membership program, the library chooses to support that with the program plus a 5% OBC processing fee. The OBC collects that, the library receives the metadata, the updates and the other benefits of the package. The publisher receives the OBC membership income. And then we take a 5% for the OBC development fund, which is to support OA book publishing ecology and to fund the outreach processing fees and OBC running costs. Obviously, this is a not for profit venture. We are actually establishing as a UK charity. So obviously, the only fees that we take are for the running and the development of the OBC itself. So now I can show you some early wireframes of what our website will look like. The reason these kind of look a bit vertical is because it's showing you what it's going to look like when you log into the website and when you scroll down or just when you land on the website. So for example, whoops, let's go back one. This is what the initial homepage is going to look like. So it kind of highlights our different benefits. And this is where our video is going to go, which is almost ready, the explainer. You can take action based on the different perspectives that you're coming from. And then if you scroll down, for example, you might want to look at building your quotation by comparing what the different publishing and publishing schemes are offering. Some of this is placeholder test. Some of it is done. So for example, ScholarLed, you can see the taxes as it's going to be. But some of that is still placeholder text right now. You can see some of the presses have given us. And there is also a support all the initiatives on the platform by the OBC collective subscription package. So you can make a custom one, or you can take one of the kind of pre-package subscriptions. You can go in and take a look at the catalogue of the different publishers, and then you can kind of build your quotation. So I'll very briefly now introduce how the OBC is governed. I can give more details on this if people wanted, but it's not the most exciting topic. It's just like important in terms of sustainability and the equity and so on. So I think I'm just going to introduce you to it. So one of the work packages of COBE and Work Package 4 is basically devoted to governance itself. And I work between Work Package 4, which is the OBC, and Work Package 4, which is governance. So I'm a kind of liaison there. And myself and Eileen Joy, who's the director of Punked and Books, have been working to draft the governance model for the OBC. So we're envisaging, well, more than envisaging now, because we're launching in the summer and we have kind of drafted this. The Open Book Collective has three governing bodies. So there's Board of Stewards, membership committee, and a general assembly of members. When you become a member, you are part of the general assembly of members, and all members have one vote. We do also offer an associate membership, or we may also offer an associate membership, which is non-voting and doesn't have kind of the expectation of being involved in governance. But I don't think that's entirely sure yet. And we hope that everybody will want to be involved in governance, at least at the level of voting, because that is part of the values that we're aiming for here. So the Board of Stewards is responsible for stewards and upholding the values of the OBC. So this refers back to those core values I introduced at the beginning, making sure that it maintains its mission and principles, adjudicating disagreements, overseeing and approving the work of the membership committee, and ensuring that the OBC follows the requisite protocols for a charitable organisation in the UK. I'm just going to move because I need to plug this phone in. The membership committee is responsible for assessing and processing applications for membership. That means that will mean we have criteria that publishers need to abide by in order to join, which are all spelled out probably in the governance documents and also that university libraries and infrastructure need to abide by. Then the general assembly of members, as I say, is everybody who will be voting at AGMs, and the OBC will be supported in doing this by two secretaries. So this is part of where that membership fee that we talked about, that 5% goes to, who will sit on both the Board of Stewards and the membership committee, but can't actually share them. We only got a few minutes left, so I want to tell you a little bit about how to connect with us and get involved. If you scan that QR code right there, you can fill out a form to join the OBC mailing list. You can follow me on Twitter. I'm the research and outreach officer for WorkPackage2, who primarily deals with the UK. You can also follow our US contact Olivia Snyder or our European contact Francesca Carrasa. We have just launched our Twitter, which is at openbookcollect. The WorkPackage2 leads are Jodeville, at Lancaster, and Eileen Joy, who is the founding director of Punked and Books, one of the publishers that we are founding with. And as I mentioned again, you can see all of Coen's outputs here at Azzinodo, at the PubPub. And I think we're just coming up to 20 minutes, so I shall leave it there for now. Thank you, Jodeff. That was great. We have got time for any questions. If anyone would like to post their questions for Jodeff in the chat. In the meantime, I know you said that you could expand a little bit on the OBC structure if people wanted to know about that. Maybe we could take some time now to give a little more detail on that, if you like. If there was anything else you wanted to expand on from what you were doing. Yeah, I can introduce you. I will introduce you to some of our new social media, I think would be a good idea. So if we go to... I'll reshare my screen right now, in a second. Oh, wrong screen. Okay, I'll share with you some of our projects. Share screen. So first here is the brand new OBC Twitter. And if we go to our profile, you can see some of our branding here. And our first link goes to... We launched this, I think, two days ago. Our introductory post on the Cope in PubPub. So this is another place where you can sign up to the mailing list. It gives you a kind of brief overview of what we're aiming for. Again, exemplifies the core values and a place to sign up to the mailing list. Are there any other kind of specific aspects? I mean, I can talk more about the governance structure is going to be initially... The place we're at now is where... Stop sharing. The place we're at now is establishing the initial board of stewards and the boards of the membership committee. After that, it will be voted on by the general membership. And that means that at kind of different points throughout the year, we haven't exactly decided how many they're going to be. Anybody who is a member can either nominate themselves or be nominated with their agreement to become part of the membership committee and the board of stewards. So it's a kind of a reverse hierarchical situation. And this is, again, to do with safeguarding the aims and the missions of the OBC and ensuring that it doesn't become... I mean, the fact that it is a charity means that it's guaranteed that it can't be incorporated by for-profit entities and it can't be taken over by a business model that is fundamental to our aims. Otherwise, it wouldn't be in line with what the charity commission requires. Not that we would let it anyway. And you're in the show and I'm going to see you. I'll just chat the chat. I don't think anybody posted any questions. No, just a comment from Tasnim saying no questions, but a great initiative. You can follow us and join us if it applies to you as a stakeholder. We've got a few minutes left, so I may as well tell you a little bit more about Copenhagen in general, because this is like an ongoing fact. Yeah, I would agree. It sounds like a great initiative. So a little bit more information about Copenhagen would be really useful, I think. Okay. Well, Copenhagen is divided into... I'll show you this image now. Copenhagen is divided into seven work packages. Share screen. Can you see this okay? Yeah, we've got that. So these are our work packages. Open Book Collective, I just explained right now. Opening the Future is a model developed for publishers who are wanting to flip to publishing open access. So basically, people subscribe to their closed backlist and then they use the money from those subscriptions to publish more OA books. So it can work really well, say for established university presses that want to change over, but it won't work for everybody because you need to have a backlist. So it can't work for like presses that are born away or are opening on the ground. Toad is our metadata project, which is the project of Work Package 5. Like I say, publishers infeed their data because one of the projects with OA books is that metadata readers don't recognize them. Amazon doesn't recognize them. Google doesn't recognize them because there's zero in the price point field, so they can't read it. So Toad is a system where publishers input their metadata and it comes out in this standardized, maximally readable form. Work Package 4, Community Governance. So again, that's what I like. How do you govern a community? And my work with them has been all about how we're going to govern this open book collective. Work Package 1 is project management and outreach. So there's not kind of much, that's not that much meat to say about that really. It's like overseeing the whole of Copim and maintaining across all these platforms that you can see. And then Work Package 6, experimental publishing and reuse. So that's about exploring new forms of, for example, digital publishing, the future of the book and this kind of thing beyond the kind of traditional monograph format. And then this is really important as well. Work Package 7, Archiving and Digital Preservation. So basically making sure that all the work that we're doing doesn't disappear into the midst of the internet and that these, both the publications and the infrastructure in the metadata can be accessed further safely. And you can also see kind of a full list of our milestones and deliveries, but deliveries deliverables by scrolling down the website. Okay. Thank you. That's actually a really good point to bring up. We have had one question from Robert, so I'll just finish with that. Yes. Okay. So the OBC is designed to be self-sustaining and beyond the end of Copim. And we've worked out a business plan, although I'm not the expert in business model, and I would pretend that I understand every word of it, that if we can get a certain amount of subscribers and publishers by certain dates that we have already kind of forecasted to get, it will be self-sustainable. It should be self-sustainable by the end of the Copim project, which is next year. But I don't know exactly like whether that is going to, how exactly that's going to work out. And one of the things that we are that we are thinking about applying for is a fun to kind of expand the work of this and then integrate more people. But as I understand it is on target. And basically it depends on the collective being successful and having enough membership to kind of keep working. But it is on target to do that. And the good thing is that the more it grows, the better value it becomes because it becomes less and less of a burden for each subscriber. And it's a tiered membership system, like the same way that JISC has a tiered membership system. So it depends on how big your institution is, like how much the different bandings cost, although I think we're still, and we do have like a formula to work with publishers to work out what is the minimum they can charge to sustain their OA ventures. Because as we say, they can't use the money for anything except OA publishing. Otherwise it's not a charity. Great. Well, thank you so much for that introduction to the great work that you've been doing. And as has been said in the comments, it sounds like a really great initiative and it's so nice to see how far it has progressed. And hopefully we'll be hearing a lot more about it in the very near future. I guess the risk is that it doesn't work and it doesn't generate enough interest or mention. But so far it actually has. And I'm optimistic about it because we only started out, yeah, we only started our Twitter, like, I think two days ago. And there's already been loads of interest and loads of science that maybe was like way beyond what we forecasted. So as much as I'm not a PI, I feel a lot kind of more secure than I did even a short time ago. We feel like quite enthusiastic about this. Good. Well, hopefully you will get some more signups and more interest now following that session. We've got lots of nice comments in the chat wishing you luck. So all that's left for me to do is to say thank you so much to Judith for coming and speaking with us today. And thank you to everyone for joining us for this session. And we hope to see you at later sessions in the conference. Okay, see you soon, everyone. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Bye.