 All right, well, hi everyone and welcome to the 2021 Tomes stakeholders meeting and a happy open access week. My name is Meredith Asbury I'm senior policy officer at the Association of American universities. And as we kick off today's meeting a you a you presses and ARL are delighted that you can join us for this important discussion. Next slide. As many of you know Tom will be entering its fifth and final year of the pilot in 2022. We, the associations in coordination with our advisory board are gearing up to assess the program and what we've accomplished and what we can learn from the initiative. And as today's program will demonstrate open access monograph activity is robust and rife with promising new models and organizations, and we are closer to an open monograph ecosystem than we were when the pilot started. Next slide. Thank you to Tomes work or need a refresher. Tom is a five year initiative led by a you a presses and ARL to increase the presence of humanities and social sciences scholarship on the web. This is a digital peer reviewed open access and fully accessible in the E pub format. These formats are made possible by the authors institutional funding with some contributions, combination of funding from library provost and departmental contributions to the fund. Next slide. The next few slides here provides some metrics from what Tom has accomplished over the last four years as a representative of a you, which represents 66 research universities. We've seen about a quarter of our members so far being active in the tone, been been active tone participants. Just this year we welcome to additional institutions who have committed to Tom funding for their faculty, University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins. I would like to extend a special welcome to those of you who are joining us today from those institutions. And certainly the window of opportunity is not closed, and we continue to encourage additional additional institutions to join. And we do hear continued interest. Next slide. There are more than 60 University presses that participate in Tom, and 23 have either published or contracted for Tom books. Next slide. And together this is produced more than 100 published open access University Press monographs financed by institutional support through Tom, and we expect by the end of next year we may reach 150 books published. This includes over 100 authors editors and $1.5 million in funding. So that is a bit of a recap of how far we've come in years one through four of Tom, and we'll turn it over now to Judy Ruttenberg with ARL to talk more about the future of Tom and where we think we're headed. Judy. Thank you so much, Meredith. So, as Meredith suggested, you know, Tom has produced books across multiple disciplines. As you can see here in the humanities and social sciences, they're fully digital peer reviewed open access and fully accessible in the format for people with disabilities. And again made possible by by institutional funding. So, because 2021 looks so different from 2017 when we started for OA monographs and this is a very exciting. It's worth, I think revisiting this the really kind of bold ambitions that are sponsoring organizations had in launching town. And this kind of this is gearing us up for the assessment as well. So, Tom, your design and approach from a white paper prepared by Ram Crow in 2012 for for ARL and AU on designing a rational system for funding scholarly monographs. And that paper suggested the following benefits to institutional funding of only monographs. One, separating publishing decisions from market consideration. And three, reducing the visibility and discoverability of these books by making them open access and three retaining high quality publishing, including peer review so that should all sound very familiar as sort of themes from past Tom meetings and how we've how we've talked about this and represented this program. The paper also, and the associations I think also hoped the system would would, and this equivalent of paper signal the legitimacy of digital first dissemination of monographs and new forms of digital scholarship, and encourage the development of alternative publishing channels including campus based publishing initiatives, some of which we'll hear from today. So, I think, I think it's nice to look back as we as we look forward. ARL AU and a presses, we do plan to work with a consultant to assess the program in 2022 and define its lessons and directional next steps. So, a presses is already begun to work on the question of what it costs to publish an o a monograph, which is a sort of a pillar of this program. And, and that work will get rolled up into the assessment that we do so I'm going to ask Peter Berkeley to say a couple of words about that work here. Thanks very much Judy and hi everyone the in a nutshell the work is in flight as we speak the foundational research in this area of course was the ethical cost of monograph study which at this point I guess is maybe six or seven years old. And then building on that a year or two after the ethical study was released the our association commissioned a couple of the principles involved in in that research to actually create an Excel based tool that would allow presses to create the cost of creating an open digital edition. And that that tool exists and is available to anybody who's interested somewhere on our website. Maybe if Brenna is listening and feeling charitable she might want to post a link to it at some point in the chat but that's entirely optional since I didn't really warn her in advance. The, the, those same two individuals who created the tool and were involved in the original in depth ethical research have been working with the association to reach out to the 30 or so university presses that have published monographs to try to gain on a, I'll say a higher level understanding of cost. One of the really valuable aspects of the ethical research was how granular and detailed. The editors got, they were on site at all 20 of the presses who participated, did interviews really got deep into the PNL's of each of the presses. That that's not feasible and likely not necessary here. The response rate from at thank you Brenna, the response rate from the presses has been sufficiently high that will get a statistically valid directional indication. I think both of costs and of some of the challenges maybe presses have encountered or fear they're going to encounter in an attempt to bring costs down. And I don't want to steal Nancy and Kim's thunder. So I won't say too terribly much more. I think that it's fair to say that certainly by December. The report will be available publicly for everyone's consumption. And Judy I know I said, it would be just a very few words. And that was a few too many so I'll stop now. Not at all. Thank you. No Peter. Thank you very much. I think the cost this issue of, you know, $15,000 the right amount. I mean these are this has been a critically important question that this group has wrestled with and it's going to be an important piece of work to know that. So in 2022. And, you know, sort of building on that we will also we do also plan to engage stakeholders on questions like the difficulty of attracting funding institutions it was wonderful to get the 20 that we did but why, why only 20 is the program scalable. You know the addressing structural issues around discoverability the more you know works appear on multiple platforms multiple do is et cetera. And then impact assessment hugely important collecting we know that collecting usage data and analytics remains a huge challenge, partly because of the multiple platforms but, but we also know that impact assessment is a qualitative endeavor as well. So, lots to dig into into there. And just crucially I think what what we'll do is engage with the landscape around us represented here on a fantastic round table. To see how the lessons of Tom, and other initiatives can help us ensure a collective funding framework for a network of scholarly presses. So I'm very excited about today's program and with that I will turn it over to Peter Potter. Thanks Judy. Next, yes, great. So today, we have a great round table discussion plan as some of you have probably noticed that October has been a cornucopia of of sessions on away books, video zoom conferences. I've been to three or four. So, it's been really interesting to hear all of the discussions. And we hear the group that we have today. Can you next slide please. So, the panelists that we have today I think are really well positioned to continue that discussion and many of us have have seen those other sessions and we're doing really our thinking is is to supplement rather than repeat a lot of what we've heard. So, the background of this is as Judy said that that Tom, as a pilot is entering its fifth and final year, and the way publishing book publishing landscape really looks different here in North America. In 2021 than it did in the beginning in 2017 2018. Just this year we've seen announcements of new initiatives such as MIT presses direct to open University of Michigan presses fund a mission, both of which set forth new funding models for a monograph publishing. So, the infrastructure for collecting reporting and analyzing usage data for a books is advanced considerably thanks to a number of efforts including the open access ebook usage data trust pilot. And we have Catherine here from, from away ebook so we really have excellent rapid representation here. We really want to focus on sort of where things are going what we've learned what we're learning, and what the future holds for a book publishing. Next slide please. So, our plan for the afternoon here is we're going to. We have really 90 minutes to work with. So, we're going to start with a first session for 30 minutes, focusing on funding models. Then we'll have a five minute break, and we'll return for discussion where we'll open it up a bit more to talk about sort of how do we make this work in the bigger picture and where we think things are going. And then we'll wrap up at the end Peter will Peter Berkeley will provide a moderated wrap up at the end. Next slide please. So, for our for this first session we have three panelists, Emily Farrell from MIT press talking about direct to open Charles Watkinson from the University of Michigan press with reference to fund a mission and Jeff Pooley. A scholar led publisher media studies press. So, I will, I'm not going to go into a lot of introductory details I'll let them introduce themselves so we can make the most of our time here. We're really looking forward to this discussion so each panelist will speak for about five minutes, and then we'll open it up for discussion so please feel free to, you know, use the chat and add questions to the q amp a, and at the end of the presentations will open it up for discussion. Next slide please. Two bits of recommended reading that I wanted to to mention as a background for this first session if you aren't familiar with it. The way books toolkit that open has prepared is really really helpful on this and if you're having trouble kind of sorting through the various funding models. There's a lot of job in there of kind of laying out the different kind of approaches we're seeing. Next slide. And I especially recommend just yesterday actually Charlotte layer of of lyricists had a blog post on open access book programs, answering libraries questions, and in there. I've simplified things in a way talking about the book models that that really made sense to me. Next slide. So, she kind of narrowed it down to really two kinds of business models, the one time spend and the ongoing spend. And one of the things about this landscape right now and I mentioned this to me is that it can get really confusing when you hear all of these different names applied to the different business models and, and it's probably a lot simpler than all of those names would suggest and I think she does a great in that post of kind of simplifying it for readers. So, feel free to take a look at both of those pieces when you have a chance. Next slide. So, with that, I will turn it over to our first speaker sorry. And we will get going Emily. And it's great to be here it's great to see so many fantastic people to be on the panel with everyone and with that I'm going to give a brief overview and hope not to take up too much time so we can get on to hearing about each initiative and to have more discussion. So, I mean, just to give a broader overview something that that most likely know MIT Press, we've been around for since the early 60s and our program in general our books program is very interdisciplinary, with a focus on distinctive design is as is well captured by the color for the process color font designed by Muriel Cooper. We're publishing about 250 books a year, 40 journals we have textbooks we have reference works. We're increasing the partnerships that we do including the Knowledge Futures group work that we've done in collaboration with MIT Media Lab. The mission of the press is to push boundaries of scholarly publishing in active partnership with the MIT community and aligned with MIT's mission to advance knowledge in science technology the arts and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century. And the reason that I state that explicitly is that I think that that like clearly aligns with what we're trying to do here with open access and open access books. The press has been experimenting with open access in different ways and forms for about two decades now. And in the last two years in particular we've been making a concerted step towards finding ways forward for open access books, which have, it's been a lot more of a challenge as, as, as everyone here in here knows. So that so recognizing that the conventional market models don't sustain monograph publishing. So we needed to find a more open and more equitable way forward. And that brings us to our model director open next slide please. So in 2019 we received support from the Arcadia fund and began to develop a business model to support our open access to support our monographs going open access. So open takes an incentivized library collective action approach to open up new monographs on publication in 2022 so the aim is to open 90 books next year. If the model is successful. Broadly speaking, we're approaching libraries or the library community as a whole and asking libraries to come together to support opening our monographs programs that is very much reliant on collective behavior. So libraries receive an incentive as individuals so that they gain access to monograph backfiled, which is around 2500 books on our platform. And they also receive discounting on our trade books collection which is kept as a separate model under a standard trade sales model. So it's a collective it means that the fees are distributed across libraries to reach a financial threshold that we've set and that we've set on the basis of gathering all the information that we could on revenue streams for monographs. The threshold doesn't change so if we receive, hopefully, if we receive larger commitments than we need. We would redistribute the funds so the hope is that implementing this model over time. If we see larger support as as support grows, the fees won't increase for libraries and that was something we wanted to make sure was the case. Next slide please. So, a little bit more on to you know what is it and how does it work. The collective action piece is incredibly important. We wanted to be able to look to a large group of libraries internationally to support this model. So that we could keep costs low for each library. And so far the response from libraries has been very positive in terms of where the prices sit the fee table which we've got up on the website and you can follow the link at the bottom. That shows you the granularity of the fee structure so we have about 16 years for us institutions. We tried to take into account size type as well as as what the information we could take that we could gather for collections budget so rather than just being a simple FTE based model we wanted to try to take account of the sort of budgets that libraries have and match that with the fees. The library centered approach we did make as much of an effort as we could to talk to libraries ahead of launching the model it was incredibly helpful we we modified the model to some degree with the feedback that we received from libraries and we're hoping to continue to do that as the model evolves. We've also built into it some flexibility for libraries if you're a more humanities focused library we do have a humanities and social sciences collection or esteem collection so there's some choice and flexibility there. There was also a desire to move away from what we have will not to move away from what we've been doing, but to approach things more comprehensively we've been able to open books on a more title by title basis. There's more processing charges, but I think more and more the conversation there is that it's it really is not an equitable approach and so many scholars just can't find the funding to open books even if they really would like to have their book go open access. So, so this, this model direct to open, allowed us to look at our whole monographs program moving forward rather than choosing titles, one by one. It's incentivize because we know I mean there's often discussion around the free rider problem and the fact that though libraries may very much want to invest in open access, even as purely open access it can sometimes be challenging to do that within the structures that are that exist in collection development and acquisitions where you have to show certain types of return on investment and pure open access model, it can be a challenge. So having an individual incentive like the back file access can help to get down some of those barriers in terms of contributing to a model like this, you, and as I said before libraries also get discounting on our front this trade collection. The other piece of direct to open that that has been appealing to libraries is that you, even if we don't reach the threshold. You still hold that access to the through the end of 2022 the term access to the archive content so in some ways that there's nothing to lose you don't have to pay the fee if we don't reach the threshold, but you do still get access to that back file and and something that has been appealing to sort of get libraries to invest in in this new model. In terms of progress, we are about a month off our deadline. We are halfway to to our threshold. So we've made incredible progress. I think we do still have a way to go. But we, the response has been incredibly positive and and that's really good to see. You know it's only offering it as an annual commitment but we've seen a third of our libraries commit for three years which I think says a lot, especially at the current time. Yeah, a lot of the support is coming from US institutions so we do have some institutions in Europe and UK, and other places. But yeah all in all moving along well away to go but we're really pleased with how things are progressing. That's for me. Thanks so much. Great. Thanks. Thanks Emily that's that's very helpful. Next up. We have Charles Watkinson from University of Michigan Press many of you know Charles and he's going to speak to us about fun to mission. Thank you for giving me this opportunity. So much of what I say will be fairly similar to what Emily just described. University of Michigan Press is a smaller university press than MIT. We produce about 100 books a year, about 80 of those are specialist scholarly monographs in the areas of performing arts, political science area studies, the ancient and American studies which includes a number of sub lists on areas like disability studies, gender class race. And the fund to mission program is really motivated by the identity of University of Michigan as depending on who you believe the number one or number three public research university in the country and with a strong commitment to the idea of knowledge for all. The slide that you see here shows a site that we are actually launching on November 2 November 1, which is something we call our accountability site. And this is a site that talks about fun to mission and the progress that we're making towards achieving its goals. And so you can see there's a collection of books. And there are ways of measuring its social impact and you'll be able to find all of this information at that site. But can I go to the next slide at this point. I wanted to talk a little bit more about the underlying belief the underlying motivator of fun to mission the underlying principle. So the underlying principle is that university presses are humanities infrastructure. So you'll see a map here that shows the 100 or so university presses that are actually based at on campuses in the US alone. And you can see that they're spread across the country, and then there are these notional dotted lines between them don't interpret too much about where those dotted lines go they're really just to suggest that university presses are constantly in contact with each other. They're constantly working together. They're constantly passing books and authors between each other. They're collaborating in various huddles. And so this is a multi institutionally funded network that is an infrastructure for the humanities. And it's very parallel in its structure to initiatives in the sciences, like the Internet to backbone, which mainly support scientific research. And so, if we think about university presses in this way as this network of laboratories for the humanities. And then the funding that goes into university presses really should be thought of by senior administrators at universities in parallel to those major investments in scientific infrastructure. This is the argument behind fund to mission, and it's built out a little bit more in this paper linked at the bottom of the screen, which was in inside higher ed and written by my colleague Melissa pits, and at university British Columbia press, and myself with huge assistance from a net wind horn at the association of university presses. That's the fundamental concept. And if we could go to the next slide. This is also what distinguishes I think the funding model for fun to mission, which is that it can't just be libraries funding this network of open access monograph activity. Because, if we think in that way we're just not going to have enough money we're not going to have the sustainability, and that has also been at the heart of the tone initiative, the belief that the funding should come from representatives of the beneficiaries of the books that we're making available, and a very important part of that is the parent institution of the university press. So, with fun to mission, you'll recognize quite a lot of similarities with the MIT press model. We have the goal of publishing 80 great new open access monographs a year in the front list. So this is a backlist restricted access archive again of about currently just under 2000 but by mid next year over 2000 books. And so libraries get access to that for the year. And the money that we raise is then put towards making available the open access front list. So the model looks very similar but the sources of the funding are really split three ways. So the community of supporting libraries is one source. The parent institution of University of Michigan press is a second source, and then other parent institutions of authors through initiatives like the tone. So it's a third source, but also other funders of various sorts of thought of as a third source so it's a three leg stool approach to funding. And what the University of Michigan provost has said provost Collins is, I believe in this enough to put my stake into this model. It's a challenge to the library community to put their stake into the model on behalf of readers. And it's also a challenge to other institutions. Not only if they have a university press to support their own university presses in this way to allow this activity, but also to support their scholars so that those institutions are not free riding on the system. She's laid down this challenge. And what we're seeing is that the library community is dramatically stepping up to meet that challenge in the United States. And our figures are almost exactly the same as Emily's. We are about 50% to our goals about a third of the libraries were supporting us supporting us for through this three year transitional phase 2021 to 2023. We see very little support from outside the United States and Canada. The UK is notably sitting on its hands. Australia is not participating. And there are very few libraries in Europe, who are contributing, and that's disappointing because the majority of our usage of our books is actually outside the US. So that is a problem. But anyhow, you can see with this slide, we are delivering tangible benefits to the supporters to the provost were boosting the reputation of the institution, the libraries received this restricted archive as a benefit of their support and authors were demonstrating the global reach and impact beyond the academy. So, thank you very much, and I'm just putting a link to this particular website fund to mission in the in the chat. Thank you. Excellent. Thanks, Charles. That was really helpful. And for our third speaker. We have Jeff Pooley representing media studies press, and I will let him introduce himself and take it from here. Yeah, thanks Peter I'm really excited to share a couple of thoughts about the way we're funding media studies dot press which, as Peter said is a small scholar led publisher that doesn't charge book processing charges. I'm also a professor of media and communication at New York College in Pennsylvania. But what I wanted to speak to is the special challenges of born away publishers that I want to discuss a kind of emerging collective funding model that I've called the mission aligned funding exchange and maybe I'll just drop a link in the chat to a recent article that I published on it in the first place. And it might be interesting I think for Tom, and when we consider its future so it's thrilling to hear about the MIT and Michigan models I think it's there they're quite similar to the CEU press, opening the future model that the UK based coven has partnered with. And, roughly speaking I would say those models are analogs in on the bookside to subscribe to open on the journal side, which itself has gained momentum recently, after you know successful pilots from annual reviews and and like I, what I would stress is that those are exciting models but that they won't work for born away publishers, the important because, as we just talked about and Emily and Charles outline these models, first of all might benefit from established spending commitments on the book and on the outside. But in some cases they also have back catalog access, or the threat in some cases of closed access for version to help kind of deal with the collective action problem that Emily mentioned and born away publishers of course have no such leverage, they have, you could say nothing legacy to post as collateral. And of course, since the early 2010s there've been lots of successful single resource experiments in collective funding that are born away so the open library of humanities is successful it's library partnership program, the archive scope three the particle physics consortium. More recently, punctum and open book publishers have both set up successful, you know, single publisher membership programs. But the problem with those is that they can't scale librarians already and many of you probably would share this. So, complain of the burdensome logistics of all of these one off funding requests, and including the challenge of vetting. Actually, so this is where the idea of the mission aligned funding exchange comes in. So the core idea, just to gloss it super quickly is to create a kind of matching platforms, what they do is they connect fee free away publishers with mission aligned funders librarians, yes, and libraries but foundations, government funders, as well for specified commitments that are tiered and crucially these exchanges aren't mediated by price alone, but instead by alignment and values so the idea is that libraries and other funders furnish direct support to these publishers on on like a web based matching platform that doubles as a fiscal clearinghouse. And the key point is that in this model funders and recipients both elaborate mission criteria, and would be recipients also supply structured information on things like scope governance licensing costs, and so on. And in this model the aspiring publisher participants are vetted by the exchange, according to principles and criteria that have been endorsed through some kind of community governance presumably inclusive of funders publishers and even scholars. And, can you change the slide please would say that the model is just emerging. And maybe I'll grow in the chat the link to the lyricists, oh a kip model which is the acronym for open access Community Investment Program. Some of you may know that it wrapped up its first successful pilot this summer, and it recently launched a second round. It is for the moment, journal focused. In fact, history of media studies which is our long just launched journal media studies dot press is one of the participating journals. And I just want to credit the already mentioned Charlotte layer at least as working with Rachel Samberg is at Berkeley and that transitioning society publications to away with its own long acronym. They essentially developed the model I credit them with it, and including the kind of key principle that value resonance should be the key matching reckon mechanism. And they hope to expand this project on by developing a proper web exchange of funding is secured, not just close on the second maybe more directly relevant to tone initiative which is has yet launched but was recently sort of unveiled to the public as a concept. Okay, based open monograph project, and their open book collective is that is the name, and I'm going to drop. Again, that link into the chat here, the open book collective idea is slated to be launched in the spring. And I will throw in the chat again a kind of report that the coping team put out on its core principles, but I'll just note one innovation that's pretty interesting of the platform as they plan it is that applications can be kind of bundled into a single funding funding appeal so that to take one example to scholar led group of publishers would have a single appeal on open book collective. And that is you can imagine the sort of exchange participant nesting would reduce some of that onerous vetting burden on librarian and other funders. And we, we use studies dot press have a membership application pending with scholar led and hope to be part of that appeal. So I guess I just conclude by throwing out that one potential way of thinking about Tom's future would be to join something like the open book collective. So if you can involve what using Charlotte layers terminology that Peter you raised at the beginning here, a switch from one time spend to ongoing spend, given the way that open book collective is imagined. But nevertheless, you could still consider kind of participant funders faculty as eligible for participation and keeping with the spirit of the current Tom model. So, with that, I will turn it back over to you, Peter. Jeff. Next slide please. Just wanted to put in a then another plug for Jeff's piece that he put in the chat. So, because it was really helpful and helpful to me in thinking through a lot of these issues. And we wanted Jeff on the panel to provide that perspective for the scholar led presses which have become an increasingly important voice in this landscape. So with that, we will open up for questions please list your questions and one from Barbara Klein Pope, our libraries prepared to participate in the individual publisher OA monograph programs. So it's really that question of scalability. And are we going to see a this this kind of collective funding, the collective behavior. What Emily spoke about is that something that we see being scalable and please everybody just on the panel here welcome to answer that question. Barbara I think that's a really good question and I have to say I was expecting to hear from more libraries that this this sort of single publisher approach that wears of looking at at least for the moment as these initiatives launch. I was expecting to hear that that that was more problematic. But it's, but it's only been something that very few libraries have actually brought up explicitly. I don't know whether that's because at the moment, there's a real willingness to sort of move in good faith towards supporting these sorts of models, knowing that this is still a little bit experimental, knowing that a step forward with a large amount of open books content for one press is perhaps, you know, at least something and that hopefully that will mean that on the horizon will be a larger sort of an aggregation approach of more presses at once. But but it's, it seems to be causing less strife than than I would have expected actually, I don't know whether what Charles has run into but that that hasn't been too much trouble. Curious Charles do how would you agree with that. Yeah, I would, and I would sort of emphasize the, what Emily said about libraries giving us the benefit of the doubt at this point. So, you know, for example, with fun to mission. It's a three year transitional period for us and libraries are willing to trust us to be good actors and move in this direction. Forbearance can't last forever. So just thinking about being ready to be accountable to libraries and help them to manage this system without too much extra work is is very important I think. I guess to say also that yeah that there's actually been more questions about what does this look like in three years five years what's the you know what are you thinking in terms of, you know, as this evolves rather than. Yeah, but a lot of good faith. I think that we had another question in the chat about small ups and can they can they will this mob these kinds of models work for them. That's something we'll deal with more in the second session but before we take a break. Anybody want to take that on. I think that I think it's a really important question because the Association of University Presses over half well over half its membership is small University Presses, and that would, you know, Michigan is on the larger end of that. Of that continuum, but when we say small University Presses where we're really saying small University Presses under 1.5 million in revenue a year. So I think it's very, very important to think about how to support them. And certainly, you know, fun to mission is a challenge offers a challenge to all provosts at all universities and all deans of humanities at all universities to pay attention to the presses that are on their campuses. And they may not be able to give $400,000 extra a year, but I'm hoping they can give something. I do think that's going to be very important. So in any model, it has to be a hybrid model, and there has to be a skin in the game from the university parents themselves, not just for the libraries. I think opening the future I think fun to mission, but direct to open I think they, these are, are potentially very, very scalable, but for university presses in the US, especially. So, and we, as I said, we'll return to this issue in the next session so we're going to take a break here we're just went two minutes over but so we will start again we'll take a break here for five minutes and be back at 152. So, see you all shortly. All right, welcome back. Everyone, we will now start the second half of our roundtable discussion and and we're going to focus on the question of how do we make this work and we have an excellent lineup of speakers, and time for more discussion at the end. Next slide please. So we'll start with Celeste Feather from lyricists. Then next will be Wendy Queen from Project Muse, Christina Drummond from the open access ebook usage data trust project, and Neil Stern and Ronald Snyder, giving us the European perspective on this from open. So, Celeste, why don't you lead us off. Thanks, Peter and hello everyone. I'm the director for content and scholarly communication at lyricists which, for those of you who aren't familiar with us as a nonprofit 501 C three membership association for libraries museums and archives with about 1000 members, but our programs serve about 1000 additional members throughout North America. And I arrived at lyricist 11 years ago after a number of years spent in several university libraries and a statewide library consortium. So group negotiations for content licensing really is one of our foundational programs that lyricists and our engagement in this work with libraries for the past 20 years. Excuse me has become a springboard to conversations with them now about the continuing evolution of scholarly communication towards open access models. About 400 libraries currently participate in open programs through lyricists and for the programs that we support at the national level lyricist membership is not required so that we can truly operate at national scale without barriers of any sorts for participation. The needs are slow to act regarding open access because their time is really limited and many of them don't yet have well developed library policies for supporting open access, let alone campus policies. They need efficient ways together and absorb the information that's required for them to make decisions, and in truth many of the high profile, oh a programs over the years have targeted large research libraries, and have not provided easy ways for teaching colleges and students to engage and we absolutely need to expand the support for away among these different types of institutions. Given the breadth of our connections across the spectrum of us higher ed, we found ourselves in a position to provide scaled outreach to the library community regarding open programs. We've created a new outreach position at lyricist specifically to focus on our work and open access and open services and I'm delighted that our new employee begins with next week. These conversations, of course, have to happen to expand awareness and understanding of all of this vibrant work that is going on in the only monograph space. We've also engaged in partnership with other library consortia in these programs and in some cases libraries outside with America. I'll take a brief with the second Peter's comments and Jeff's comments to about the great work that my colleague Charlotte layer open access strategist is doing that is really advancing the conversations we are having with both libraries and publishers. The next slide please. So it's become crystal clear to us that diverse models are required to meet the various needs of the disciplines in the library funders and I think there are lots of reasons to view this diversity in a very positive light. Different models provide different incentives that libraries need if they are to engage with a way, such as showing their support on campus for a specific field of study, or providing companion access to paywall content, showing their support for open access in general lowering costs is a big one and programs that have strong general curricular relevancy. It seems to me that a healthy amount of the diversity among these business models is aimed towards creating a diverse set of incentives to encourage library engagement. I've listed here a number of examples of a monograph programs that lyricist actively supports, and we fulfill a variety of responsibilities for each program, customizing our role to meet the needs of each specific one. The work with the University of Michigan, for example, is extensive, and it involves outreach, gathering orders or pledges, handling the kinds of documentation is like pledge commitment forms or license agreements when those are required, and all of the fiscal operations necessary to, in the end, send the collected funds on to Michigan. It's very hard to keep the administrative process lightweight yet remain responsive to the local needs when libraries have specific requirements. In our world procurement processes have definitely become more prominent in our open related work than they have been in years past. I'd like to make particular note of a program that we established last year to support the publishing of books aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. We also came out of our conversations to renegotiate a journal package with Springer Nature, because we were seeking ways to direct funds to OA books at Springer, whether they continue to spend more dollars on the same journal content, year after year. Out of a modest pool of funds, we've been able to fund six books so far published under Springer Nature and Palgrave McMillan imprints in 2021. We're in the process now of asking for a second round of funding from libraries to expand our work in 2022 to more publishers that have signed the UN SDG publishers compact. We've targeted titles that are appropriate for upper level undergraduate curricular support because that was an area of common interest to all of the libraries in our Springer Nature journals group from small liberal arts colleges all the way up to research one piece. And I was especially pleased to see last week that AU presses joined the publishers compact because in truth US university presses were not well represented on that list last year. I'll close by noting that scale happens in different ways. Services like DOAB have become vital for the ecosystem and these infrastructure topics fit very well into conversations with libraries about OA monographs. Now it seems most critical to us to scale the outreach portion of our work for all of these programs and along the same lines we recognize that we're quickly moving into the space where libraries appreciate the practicality and the scale of supporting multiple OA programs through a familiar administrative process. So thank you. I think my time is up and I'll turn things over to Wendy. Great. Thanks, Celeste. Wendy, you're up. Thank you. And thank you, Peter, for inviting me to present today on behalf of Project Muse, Wendy Queen, the director of Project Muse, which is a division of Johns Hopkins University Press. I titled my five minute slot from little I to big I to stress that we are very much in the beginning stages of defining what open access infrastructure means to our collective missions to create, distribute and understand the impact of OA monographs. I have to start by telling you my definition because I take a liberal definition of infrastructure, and I define it by all the components necessary to support the creation, distribution, discovery, discoverability, accessibility and preservation of content. And a well injured, a well engineered infrastructure creates its strengths not by creating a mini grid and doing everything on its own, but supporting a larger network of components and concentrating efforts to preserve and utilize resources and in turn have the redundancy capacity and strength of a larger system. I once heard the analogy and I wish I remember who said it so I could credit them that a great definition of infrastructure is if you turn it off, people will complain. So think electricity. The purpose of this specific infrastructure's mission is to treat open access content, like gated content in every respect with the noted exception of access methods. That is the value of infrastructure, lots of different uses, and in Muse's case we're leveraging the capabilities of an existing platform, and the leveraging provides us to scale necessary to support many varieties of programs. To be robustness we partner orchestrate an experiment and many ways from supporting programs like Tom knowledge, unlatched CEUP is the opening the future. To relying on critical pieces of the infrastructure from partners to support things like preservation and additional discovery. Narratives like analytics which Christina will speak about is the perfect example of moving from a mini grid, meaning Muse provides one slice of the narrative through its own analytics to a more robust shared infrastructure, thus potentially stronger result. So, while not monographs, I would be remiss not to mention the work Muse is doing on the journal side to analyze a subscribe to open approach for journals. The questions learned from journals are not an exact translation to books, but many of the EGI goals are the same. How do we provide as much equal access to content as possible. And I'm very appreciative that the Mellon Foundation is supporting us on this effort, and I think this effort also addresses many of the questions we're having about how do the smaller up is create programs and we're hoping we can create something at scale at Muse for them. And there, there's still a very strong need to keep experimenting and prototyping before building out, as there are a lot of mini grids or single use components. And how do these components work together. Cliff Lynch at CNI a few years ago asked the community that very question and collectively, we didn't have a very good answer. And we've certainly made progress, but we need to consent, continue pursuing the answer. And what I believe he was stressing in his question was interoperability. And that's really moving towards the big eye, meaning we really embrace the interoperability is that's the pathway to robust infrastructure. And I must say what attracted me to this graphic on my slide is the similarity to infrastructure to a tree and making interoperability being the foundation on or the roots to growth and connection. So, thank you. Excellent. Thanks, Wendy. That was really helpful. And next up, we have a Christina drumming from the way ebook data trust project and to speak to a very important part of the equation. Please, Christina, you have the floor. Thank you so much, Peter and hi everyone. So for those who aren't familiar with the oh a eboo project because open access ebook usage data trust is quite a mouthful. I'm honored to be here to represent a growing global group of organizations that have been working to achieve economies of scale by pursuing, ultimately a shared solution to streamline the ethical use aggregation and exchange of usage data, specific to open access ebooks and wanting to do that in a community governed way. Our advisory board and technical advisory group represent university presses, nonprofit and commercial publishers, open access aggregators and distributors as well as other publishing metadata platforms and services with representatives from over five continents. And over the past two years with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, our project has produced a lot of foundational research to really understand a couple things about the issues that exist around open access book usage data. What are the challenges that we have to address in order to get to a place of real time analytics as opposed to just reporting to what that data ecosystem looks like and what the usage data flows are among parties. And three, the way scholars and specific staff within libraries university presses, commercial publishers and platforms, how they work with usage data for reporting and analytics. We also included open source infrastructure, developing proof of concept dashboards with four university presses, a weapon and one commercial publisher, to better understand the underlying data aggregation and presentation challenges to inform our evolution. In this kind of bigger picture, we also commissioned a legal analysis to understand the relevant global data regulations that we have to work with an environmental scan to understand the various market forces and different kinds of stakeholders working in this place, and some as well. These project outputs have informed our advisory board and project team conversations, highlighting both the differing mission service delivery models and direct stakeholders between the usage data dashboards, and what I like to call that data exchange function, which I commonly think of when I refer to the data trust. Further, we learned that if we are operating in Europe. There's a forthcoming data governance act that would require any neutral data broker to not provision analytics or dashboards in order to protect that neutrality, which meant that for the second half of this year of our project, we've been working to prepare our efforts to split into two, one being the data trust as the exchange function which you see on the left and purple. And the other being that usage data dashboarding service to really help support small to medium publishers who may not have the internal capacity to develop solutions on their own. Next slide please. We're now actively preparing funding proposals for the next phase of our work 2022 to 2025 with Cameron Neal and Lucy Montgomery and Neil Stern leading the dashboard demonstration project forward focused on those usage data dashboards. While I'm working with Kevin Hopkins and others to pull together a consortia to continue the exchange effort that would fit upstream of that dashboarding service and other dashboarding services I should note. At the stage of the data trust we're looking to pilot the international data space model and standards that's emerging from other industries through guy X initiatives in Europe. For those who are unfamiliar with the international data spaces or IDS models, and how they relate. I draw your attention to the model shown on the slide which is actually sourced from the International Data Spaces Association at the URL shown. We're looking at the data space as the legal and operational scaffolding for data ecosystem, much like and runs provide services to Internet to in US or giant in Europe for Internet connectivity. These international data spaces are providing that connectivity and the agreements between parties to facilitate those API connections between parties, almost acting as a middleware interface if you will between separately controlled sovereign data, which allows for that secure processing in the middle of the data space that otherwise wouldn't occur. When you're trying to combine not only open data, but that privately held sensitive data that in this case would be usage data provisioned from multiple platforms and publishers. The main phase of the data trust is to pilot this data space model for open access book usage data, which will involve documenting those agreements and creating that community data rulebook and formalizing the trust inducing technical and legal mechanisms to streamline that data exchange and aggregation between the providers and the downstream data users. We're working right now to identify next year's fiscal sponsor for the data trust finances and staff, but we'll also be seeking nominations for data trust initial board of trustees later this year. And simultaneously we're also inviting those who see a role for themselves, you know, I know where I fit in this ideas model to contact us because we're definitely looking to build out that consortia to seek horizon Europe funding in this coming April. So with that, that's all I have. Thanks, Peter. Excellent. Thanks. Thanks, Christina. And finally, from across the pond. We're really fortunate to have both Neil Stern and Ronald Snyder here to join us and provide their perspective. Thank you, Peter. And thanks for having us here to today. Hello everyone. Good evening from Europe. I'm very happy to share just a few insights into the open foundation and what we're doing. My name is Neil Stern. I'm, I'm Danish actually and I have a background in university press publishing for quite a few years but also spent a few years in the library, acquiring content and licensing. So I have a side of both perspective from both sides. So open foundation is here to enable open access to scholarly books and our mission is to increase the discoverability of open access books, but also to build trust around open access books and we do this by providing three services. One is the open library, which offers premium services for publishers, funders and libraries. Then we have the directory of open access books, which is a basic indexing service. And then the way books toolkits, which Peter mentioned, which is a public information resource geared towards authors and others who want to seek more information about away books. Next slide, please. So just a few words on the background for what we do. When I was at the university press in Copenhagen, we were partnering with gives me with the five other European university presses to see how we could increase the dissemination of books. At the time there weren't many initiatives and we had this project then called the open project which was co funded by the European Commission. When that ended, a weapon was turned into a foundation and then inviting publishers from all around the world to join and that has been going on ever since. In 2012, we created the directory of open access books, and then last year the toolkit was launched. So today to show that we are much more than a European project today. We host more than 18,000 away books and chapters from over 300 international publishers. And just this year, we also had Charles Watkinson on our board, so really trying to embrace also being internationally in that way. Next slide please. Charles is just to give very briefly an insight into the way we work behind the scenes, let's say so the open library and the do AB database which holds more than 44,000 titles are pushed through the systems in different ways so we engage with the intermediaries like exclipere's ProQuest OCLC EPSCO through our feeds but also with Google Scholar and other important databases like base and core and projects like open a open BBC and open ABC. So this is all of the things that really are happening behind the scenes and and as Wendy said if you turn off the infrastructure you sort of turn off the light here as well and all these connections break so this is quite important of course. Next slide please. My final slide here, really trying to address the question that Peter raised about how to make all this work. So there are a few things I'd like to highlight and the first one is really that we need to sustain robust and efficient open infrastructures for books and other open science objects. Looking at it from the library point of view and with my background in licensing and and also heading the National Consortium in Denmark. I really saw how dependent we had become on big commercial entities, sort of locking in the infrastructures for journals. And I think there's still time to avoid that for books because we're still in an early stage and we have several open infrastructures that can stay open if we want to and be adaptive and attentive to what's what are what the needs are amongst the publishers and the libraries and the funders and so on through an open dialogue. So we are mission driven we're not profit rather than profit seeking institutions and I think there's a element of cost efficiency there too. Secondly, and this is also touching on what Wendy said, I think it's really important that we develop smooth and interoperable network of infrastructures, enabling research output to flow seamlessly in a structured manner between scholars and society at large. So this is really the vision in my view of open science that it's not just about books it's also about the research data it's about, of course the journal articles but also all the other elements that together are part of the open science umbrella. And all this could be open citations as well of course should come together in in well working infrastructures that are interoperable. So this is very important. And finally just on the business model and and how it can be sustained I think like Charles said we also work on a, let's say three legged business model. So we have revenue coming in from publisher fees for publishers who are part of the library. We have good contributions from library institutions who support us through our library membership program. And finally we do services for a handful of funders. And that contribute also to our revenue. We've just been happy to onboard scope free the pilot for books scope free pilot for books, and we now host their collection in the open library. And in this way with with these, let's say three legs of revenue, we can sustain our funding moving forward. And, and that's, I think will be to the benefit of the whole community that we can then engage further with the community and adapt also on our technical roadmap as we move forward. So with that, thanks for having us here and look forward to the discussion. Thanks. Excellent. Thanks very much. That was, again, really helpful and kind of bringing things together if you, if anyone has questions, please. I'm not sure if the q amp a is working right now but if you have trouble with the q amp a just put the question in the chat. I wanted to start things off actually we had a question. That's an important kind of baseline I think for this discussion which is how do we define open infrastructure. And if the definition includes free access and how do we sustain the infrastructure and Niels you certainly touched on that in your comments what what how would you respond to that. So, I would say that the, the, sorry, I'm just closing the window. Yeah, so, so how do we define open infrastructures. Well, it, it, it definitely stands as kind of there are a few things I think that are really important and we've seen that in response from the library community that an open infrastructure structures should be transparent. It should be engaging with the community, and it should be mission driven. And I think those are just a few keywords. There are some very good principles for scholarly open scholarly infrastructures. The, the principles have been written by Cameron Nealon and, and two others. And I think this set of principles are really worth looking into because it gives you, it gives us a common ground to, to, to make sure that infrastructures are not just open, but they are also engaging with the community and they are sustainable and reliable. Also, and anybody else want to add to that. I'll just add robustness to the open infrastructure and I know I use this word a lot, but it is about some of that really does incorporate knowing where to have the right redundancies for the best stability going forward. And that's very different than when I described like the mini grid, which is everybody sort of doing the same thing and their own little corner, and there's ways to have in the open infrastructure, you know, much more support much more robust support for your developers and your systems. I'm curious in the space that the term interoperability has come up a lot. And I wonder if the panelists. Are you optimistic about the future of this are we are we moving in the right direction are we optimistic that we're going to build the infrastructure we need. Anyone's welcome to answer that. Well, let me let me try. Well, at least I think I'm cautiously optimistic. That's for someone like me that's actually quite a lot. I think a lot of organizations in in ours, let's say in our infrastructural world are understanding that they have to work together in some way, or surrender to the large commercial players. Of course, everybody being small and being so that being so there is no incentive to try to to rule the world but instead to join the comments. And as far as what I see is that a lot of organizations are trying to build something that fits within a larger space and if there is a certainly what we are trying to do is if there are standards that we can at her to we try very hard to to do that and also the things that we create like for instance we create a lot of metadata. We make sure not only that it is at her to standards but it's also freely available so if we were to crash then somebody else could in theory just pick up everything that we have and start all over again. So I think that's. Yeah, so this is why I have I'm slightly optimistic here. Others want to weigh in on that. We do have another question in the Q&A from Sarah McKee following on Charles's challenge to University administrator to support their own campus presses. Do the panelists have thoughts on how universities without presses the free riders could support this segment of humanities infrastructure beyond BPCs for their faculty. She raises the point about and Rob Charles has been quite clear on this that library support is not enough it needs to be broader than that so how do we how do we make that happen. It's a good question. I mean, not to put words in Charles's mouth but I do think that, you know, it's not just library so I think even if an institution doesn't have a press there are still all manner of ways that that there can be engagement with these new models I mean certainly library funds themselves which move move away from from individual book processing charges so like the models we've been talking about that are collective. That is a really big step, and it's a step in the right direction. I do wonder about the ways that research offices or other other sections of the institution more broadly can can participate. And that's, that's a, that's a part that you know is certainly challenging because we know well how to engage with libraries but trying to bring in other sections of the institutions is not quite so easy. There's not necessarily always the same lines of dialogue or channels of communication open. That said, I think it's, I can't help but but so quickly grab on to that idea of free rider because I think what I what I like and thinking about these new models is that it really is calling for all these pieces to work together a little bit better. I recognize the fact that we, we all in this system benefit from from, you know, well produced cared for scholarship researchers benefit from it, institutions benefit from it, because their research has benefit from it. So I think that the you know trying to think about this whole, this whole thing as an ecosystem rather than what we've been in the ways that the sort of structures are in place to think of well how am I building my collection from my library, and thinking more broadly, for instance, in the diagram that Charles showed which I think I really appreciated saying this is a network we are producing a larger body of scholarship that an institute, even if it doesn't have a press benefits from so you know how do we message that how do we bring those parts together that that's not there's not easy solutions for that but something to continue to consider. And this is going to add to that that I think Emily is absolutely right about free rider being a bad term, I mean, Sarah McKee asking that from Emory I mean Emory is the opposite of a free rider but doesn't have a university press I mean has multiple ways in which it's supporting humanities infrastructure, but I do think that the idea that an institution might make it possible for their faculty to contribute money into the system through what may look like a BPC right. It shouldn't be underestimated how that really fits very nicely with the existing structures of many universities. There are established structures for doing that kind of startup funding for faculty or, you know, research funds. It fits very nicely into how universities operate in many cases, in the same way as programs like direct to open and fund to mission and open the future fit well into library workflows as well. And that's all to say that the message that I've been told to bring to this meeting today from our associate dean for the humanities at Michigan and also my colleague who see associate university library and research is please don't get rid of our option to use tome to fund to put the the provost's money to put the college of liberal answers money that literature science and the answers money into the system, because it works for us. And we're now enthusiastic and ready in a way that we weren't five years ago to do that. So just to say that this is a this is a channel and we shouldn't we shouldn't underestimate the power of that. Yeah, and and I would add that. You know with tome that we're as we're looking for the next phase to tome. This is the big question is there is there a space for tome to operate here and we had one question that I wanted to answer. I would say it was mentioned earlier that the window of opportunity for joining tome is not closed. Would you say more about that given that you're in your last pilot year so as Judy mentioned we've had. We continue to get requests from institutions who are interested in participating and obviously as the pilot comes to a close comes to a close. There's not the window of opportunity is closing but we still encourage institutions who want to participate to to come on board and tell us how many books they would like to, they would like to fund. I mean we want to build muscle memory here that will continue after the project and this is definitely something that with the consultant that we hire will need to address this, this very question like how do we keep this going how do we keep the funding going. So, do others have thoughts on on the question about sort of a role for tome in the future. I want to second what Charles has said about the necessity of keeping this funding string quit frankly coming from places at the university outside the libraries. It's been a big part of our ongoing conversations and that that sets up potential conversations to encourage libraries to kick in right if they know that other parts of the campus are kicking in or it is not all on them because what we hear frequently from the library community is it shouldn't all be on us. And we don't currently have that many other places to point to and say it's not on you. The home is one of those those exceptions. And I think, although it might seem modest and me at this point, just at a very high level the fact that you're here and you're engaging in trying to incorporate more people outside the library into the conversation and therefore get more shared contributions is a wonderful thing and it should not vanish from the landscape. And just add to that I think. So I think it's it's important to remember that a way to books is really very new still. So a few years ago it was kind of still very much in the in the shade of journals. And I think also we have to understand the the economy in new ways in different ways so I, I, you know, second that talking about free writers probably is not the right idea. So for instance, we, we know that more than 1100 libraries make use of the open library directly at the institution. We have a supporting base of 150 perhaps, but that doesn't make them to free writers it's it's really great that they make use of the all the way books. And of course, they I know from inside a library that a lot of consideration is going on and strategically about how to support all these open science initiatives. So I think it's it's also about be aware that that there is a lot of experimentation ongoing which is great and we've heard good examples today. And this will, this will pick up and and we have probably to think about this economy in a different way than the traditional transactional economy where, where we used to think so I really am on that background I'm really optimistic because there's so much going on. Thanks. And, and glad one of the, one of the questions is regarding the copines open book collective which I'm glad was raised. Because the open book collective which Jeff mentioned. The conversation is around how to package or slit out infrastructure from content. Should a library be able to pledge support for just a content package or just a piece of infrastructure or is it better to fold them together. How might a program like Tom approach this. I mean, one thing about. Yeah infrastructure is definitely an emerging word I mean, I think there is a, there's an interesting model where these content collections do also sit on community owned infrastructure, which is again a very charged word. And, you know, department of shame was commerce but you university of Michigan Press as a book collection does sit on open source infrastructure, the full current platform, and one of the big focuses has been on open standards as well. And I, I don't, I that the ideal model feels like a both and right that when one is supporting open content. One is also supporting open infrastructure, and that need not just be the platforms for publishers who are lucky enough to have their own platforms. So the way those publishers are then feeding money back to do a bnw up or hypothesis, or other tools in a landscape and if it's not money contributing coding expertise or creating connections. I really like the model where it's not either open content or open infrastructure but both and just add to that I think there's a space perhaps for tone to take the mantle with an advocacy frame because part of this open infrastructure challenge is really creating the the public funding to sustain this at that ecosystem level and I think our friends in Europe have a lot more support at the national and regional level that we don't have from the nrends here in the US, we don't have necessarily some federal agencies. And if tone could help raise the profile and make the case quite frankly for why we need that level of support. I think that could go a long way to, to add an additional revenue stream. I know we've talked about the internet as kind of a parallel to this well the, you know, there's a reason internet to had substantial NSF funding because it was critical infrastructure. So, if this is critical humanities infrastructure. How do we sustain it as a country, among each of our countries, I will add to that note. And just at the risk of saying too much, talking too much. I think that's absolutely right Christina and I think one of the things that really is interesting comparing the Europe to the USA is the way in which operas and copium and other, the operas and do a be have positioned the work of books in the open science framework, and have spent an awful lot of time, making sure that science, the open science is understood to include the humanities and qualitative social sciences. And that is something that we haven't done as much in the US. And I think that Christina's point about NSF and cyber infrastructure and the words that they understand and want to support. I think if we can reposition the conversation to talk about these concepts which will be familiar to the sciences. We might be able to do some of the same work that has happened in Europe. And Rachel Caldwell asks, does the plus model of community action publishing through a journal publisher, though a journal publisher model, help frame this conversation and which every library can contribute somehow maybe through a distributed flat B. I would say yes. In our work here at lyricist we, because we do talk to libraries of all types and sizes related to institutions that are diverse as well. And we are very careful and that list of programs that we showed you, there absolutely was consideration about the specific kind of library and their ability to contribute. You know, I love the plus cap model, because for lots of reasons but also, so a couple big ones. One is that everybody is asked to contribute, but it also extends beyond the first or the corresponding author and goes on down the line for the second report author to assign some portion of the cost to the post fee to their universities as well so it does a nice job of distributing the, the requests for support across the entire community rather than just pay to publish models to. So, yes, I think very much those sorts of, you know, parameters around the plus community action publishing model do translate in many ways nicely to the approaches that are many people are taking to get libraries to contribute to ebook programs, and they should be that I mean one of the things that Tom has shown, I mean we came into it with the idea that we, we knew there's money in the system to support away book publishing. Could, could we, it was an experiment and trying to get that money out there. And could it be, could we establish proof of concept and I think we really have in the sense that we have over 100 books published supported to date. And we have given out over a million and a half in grants. So it suggests that this is possible. If it can scale up. The question is how do we, how do we bring all of that good will together. And that that I think that's where I think there is room for tone to have a role but I somehow think it needs a an institutional home to, to build upon. And that's something we haven't had to date. Thoughts on that. I really think that the thing that Tom has on its website, the very first line is Tom is a movement, not a club. And it's building on what Celeste said, you know, the level press is another really interesting collaborative model in this open access book space, and it involves a number of smaller liberal arts colleges, coming together to support publishing. There's an interesting group who are showing their willing and energy around open access books, but they're not part of Tom. And how did we make this a big tent, and not make it just for, you know, research libraries research institutions. And I think that's something we've got to get over because there's so much energy and goodwill and desire actually to contribute at small institutions, but I think they the pathways are a little bit lacking at the moment. Sorry, Peter that's not a direct directly building on your question but no that but that's that's exactly what I was getting at so yeah that's helpful. Let's see. Other questions folks have. I know we've talked as a group about federated approach. You know, the open book collective is based upon this idea of scaling small. And it does make me wonder if here in the US, if there's a way to to actually have a real collective devoted to this and if Tom again is the solution to that, to that problem because we, you know, there's, there's that collective goodwill, but it is a matter of. Can we can we bring it all together. Something that occurs to me in hearing the discussion and, and the positives but also the concern about, you know, are we putting too many models out into the market but at the same time, there's a clear need for the diversity of models there's a clear need for other approaches, but how do so many new models of exist next to each other and, you know, also to what Celeste spoke of and what Charlotte wrote in her post yesterday. How do we communicate that well I would say that there's perhaps space for us to come together to to consider communication and to do that perhaps with some some library stakeholders are there better ways that we could be seeing the similarities and differences of these models clear. Are there ways that we can consider talking through how how we are sending out messaging around these models. I think that that that could be beneficial for. I mean I could see the benefit of that. We had a question that I'm hoping Meredith will be willing to weigh in on it. It's from Kaiser Walker Cornell. The presses and library seem to have been active in the conversation around Tom, but a is also a sponsor along with a U presses and ARL what shape has that conversation taken at the provost university administration level. Yeah thanks Peter it's a good question. You know a you continues to increase awareness amongst our provost and university leadership about Tom. And I can certainly provide some renewed interest and opportunity to push for investment of open access monographs. I think the biggest challenge at the provost level continues to be the number of things that they're asked to fund. And this is just another another thing that they're being asked to fund. I do think many of them see the value in it is just, it's a challenge of, you know the limited funds that they have to provide at their at their level. I just pick up on what Emily said because I think it was a very good point about really bringing these initiatives together and and be focusing on communication so Charles mentioned operas in Europe and how we've been really building an infrastructure to bring humanities scholarship in the broad sense together and social sciences, which brings also books into the discussion, but books are just a small part of that whole spectrum so so to bring books into the awareness of university administrations can be quite a challenge. So I think bringing a lot of actors together in this that has been successful with operas operas was put on the the so called S free road map so being acknowledged by the European Commission as a research infrastructure for for the humanities and social sciences. I think that that would be great to, to, you know, bring this together a bit like lyricists has been doing for, you know, trying to collect all these initiatives, and, and definitely also for us to to in in the US context with which is, it's quite new to us but but we've been happy to see some support coming in from the US and would really like to engage further so I think that's a very good approach. Thank you. Sure. I did want to question. Not that quick question Meredith statement a little bit I mean, just in terms of an AU members funding. I mean, you know, a startup chemistry faculties lab can cost between $500,000 and a million dollars. So we're not really asking for an awful lot of support for the humanities here. And I do wonder whether this is really beyond the reach of AU members. I think you raise a good point Charles, you know, I just want, I think this is, these have been our observations that we've seen as we've tried to communicate the program and try and get more institutions involved, but there are certainly challenges and opportunities as well. So we're at just about at the end of the roundtable discussion. Does anybody want to, anybody from the panel want to add anything before we turn it over to Peter Berkeley. So thank you again. I think that it's very helpful for us all to come together to talk about these things to see what sorts of questions there are and you know I do think that that sometimes it can be hard to balance the sort of market pressures and the sense of competitiveness of trying to, you know, make your finances work as a university press, and being able to sort of come together in these spaces and consider what we're all trying to do you know what we're plugging away at every day, and to consider it in a larger context I think is incredibly helpful because I do think in terms of values alignment there's so much here that we want to do that fits together very well and is very mission based and I think that, you know, we do need to take this time to pull that together and see how it works and see how we can communicate externally in a clear way. So thanks. If I could just add to that. I think that, you know, looking towards that collective impact is going to achieve to the extent that we have more of these opportunities to come together, not only to check like where each other are but to really come up with a more of these infrastructure roadmap, because I think that's the piece that piece is missing right now. So we know where all of us are going to end in three to five years and to the extent Tom can help with that that would be huge. Peter, do you want to take over from here. Thanks very much. Fantastic conversation this has been those of you who attend a lot of conferences in Washington DC. At some point or another will have been exposed to a federal government speaker who always begins their remarks with the weasley disclaimer that the views they express are their own, and that they're not speaking on behalf of their agency. So if my foot gets inserted in anybody's mouth in the next five minutes, it's mine, and not my member presses. I think really this has been the perfect agenda for the final year of the tone pilot, as we begin to think about the assessment of the pilot and to contemplate what might come next, because it places Tom in the context of a landscape for open access which is materially evolved from when we launched just four years ago. And that's exciting. So I'll start with just two smaller observations, and then try to bring it home. The first of those is you know we did. It has to be credited that we did identify some challenges today. Well availability is a concern discover abilities a concern no one mentioned preservation today but we know from other conversations that that's something that we have to keep our eyes on. I was particularly struck by Wendy's talk title infrastructure from little I to big I because I think that's exactly the right way to look at the infrastructure challenges and creating an open monograph ecosystem. From the perspective of presses, I think workflow standardization is going to be a challenge on moving forward. But that said, the thing that struck the second smaller observation is the thing that struck me the most about today's conversation is that while it occurred, cognizant of funding and monetary issues. There really was a conversation driven by value and values to borrow a phrase from one of Charles's PowerPoints. And by values, I believe Charles meant and I mean academic values or what we don't like to believe the values of the Academy ought to be on a good day. And so we heard no small number of examples of that. We heard Celeste talk about aligning with the UN sustainable development goals. We heard Emily mentioned a good faith on the part of libraries in approaching fun to mission and fun to open. Charles talked about community funding he talked about a set of principles for open infrastructure. So, so I think it's significant that this initiative in this effort is being undertaken with a new and and and maybe different set of values then marketplace values in mind I think that's important. So with those two smaller observations. What should one take away from today. If you've know me and you've had the opportunity to hear me speak before you know that sometimes my, my go to author for quotes is Tony Kushner. Tony Kushner talks in angels in America he that one of the key phrases from from that is the great work begins and and what I take away from today is that in fact, with apologies to Tony Kushner, it's a great work here has begun. A community of practice has evolved that's clear. That's exciting and and rewarding to watch. But moving. So to move just a little bit beyond the notion of the community of practice that's already emerging. I just in closing mentioned that in part two of angels in America in Paris Stryker where prior Walter delivers his epilogue. He doesn't just repeat the eight you know the first time we hear the great work begins is when the angel comes crashing through the ceiling at the at the end of part one millennium. And again at the very end when prior Walter's talking with believes in front of the Bethesda fountain. And in that same. In that same epilogue prior Walter also says the world only spins forward. And the reason I thought of that is when Peter Potter used the phrase muscle memory. I think that's an important phrase we're developing muscle memory here today. And, and all of the work that all of the folks who've spoken is evidence of muscle memory. And so I just again I think today's conversation was exactly the right one for the last year the tone pilot. I'm grateful to all of you for participating and to at one point I think we're up to 85 folks listening it which is remarkable really 85 folks listening in and sharing their interest and enthusiasm in creating an open monograph ecosystem. So thanks everybody and back over to you Peter. Excellent. That was a great way to wrap up. I want to open it up again to anyone in the last few minutes if you want to respond or indicate sort of what thoughts on the next steps and where we where we can go from here. I'm in support of Emily's suggestion as well that as among this panel with many of my partners and important components of the infrastructure that we're using to support away, but I was just trying to recollect when this was the last time I had a real conversation with any of them right and I think that just highlights that there sort of isn't this centralized place. And maybe Tom is that to think about that bigger ecosystem and sort of learn from each other about how we can start working towards a shared infrastructure. There's a lot to learn so I just wanted to advocate advocate for Emily suggestion as well. I just, I think very struck by a piece of writing that Martin Eve in the UK and our colleague in University Press land Anthony con from Liverpool University Press just recent research information. It's a very good piece because it articulates the stakes here. And what they say at the end is, you know, if we don't invest in helping monographs with the currency of humanities become open access. And I'm quoting, we will reach a world where all scientific work is free to read by the public, but all humanities work is prohibitively expensive. We must avoid this elitist world at all costs. And I think that's a very important thing for you to listen to, because that is the danger if we hadn't had the insights of humanists. We would not understand why vaccines are resisted by people we would not understand why certain groups in society are more resistant to vaccines and others and we wouldn't have been able to roll out vaccination. So it's just such an important point if we don't allow authors to participate in this world of vetted knowledge. We're going to do the whole society at this service. So the stakes are very, very high and agree more. I think we're that brings us about to a close. I don't know if Judy Meredith. If you want to say anything as we conclude. Well, just say thank you to all the panelists and to everyone who participated in this program I can't top that last line from Charles though I think that's just a really important insight. But I do want to say thanks to everyone who who spoke and I you know I think just on behalf of my piece of time I just think it's wonderful to have hosted this conversation today. Great. So, well, again, thanks everybody. Thanks to the panelists for providing a great discussion. And thanks to all of those who joined us. We're really happy that we were able to bring everyone together and and I think we have made some progress here so looking forward to hopefully next time around when we do this will have a report on Tom to be able to discuss and and really begin to dig into next steps so thanks everybody again for joining us and we look forward to talking soon in the future. Thanks, Peter.