 I'm really pleased today to be here with my colleagues from the COPIM project to talk about open access monographs, their infrastructures, their funding models and their developments. My name is Martin Paul Eve and I'm going to give you a brief introduction to the landscape as it stands and hopefully also some background that will inform our breakout groups and discussions in the workshops. By way of personal introduction I am Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck College at the University of London. I am the author of nine books, all of which are OA monographs, they're open access, and I've had long-standing interest in developing equitable funding structures in particular for open access in the humanities disciplines, where we often find it difficult to gather APC funding for journals or book processing charge funding in the book space. I guess it's worth just backing up a little bit for this framing session and just to ask why does open access matter, why does it matter for books and why does it matter at this point? It seems abundantly clear to me that COVID-19 was the sharp end expose of a crumbling research publication infrastructure in the humanities and social sciences. As anyone who knows my Twitter feed will know about me, I'm clinically extremely vulnerable and during the pandemic period when suddenly I was locked out of research libraries in lockdowns, it became virtually impossible to conduct my research work at home without access to those print infrastructures. It seemed to me that COVID-19 exposed the need for digital and uniformly open access to even long form writing in these spaces, but I also appreciate that the COVID-19 pandemic also gave us the sharp end of budgetary constraints and a tidal wave of anxiety about institutional finance followed that initial period of lockdowns. I think also though those who recognize the structure of the publishing industry are also aware that over the past few decades the profile of the monograph and its sales have changed quite radically. Press sustainability has been threatened by demand-driven acquisition in part which delivers only a fraction of the revenue required to produce a book every time it's accessed and the number of sales of titles that can be expected at presses has gone through the floor to put it politely. Open access then could offer us increased readership usage and citation of these volumes and we're also seeing a number of funder mandates coming through that are pushing for long form writing the research monograph to be made openly accessible. Indeed we know that we're in the middle of the moment of a changing policy landscape and that things are shifting quite rapidly so we had the recent UKRI review in the UK that has stated that from 2024 open access will be extended to monographs that are published under UKRI funded umbrellas. I suppose in the UK context we all know that UKRI project funding is only a sliver of the entire output in monographs or any other research space and really what we're waiting on at the moment is the REF review which will think about the conditions under which monographs can be submitted to the next REF here. The ministerial steer is that there should be a stronger push for open access. The policy won't steer is that ideally REF policy will be harmonized with UKRI statements and so if I were gazing into my crystal ball at this point I'd probably say well the REF policy will look a lot like the UKRI policy. What we're not clear on is how that will be funded and I suppose in this opening talk today I'm going to talk about the challenges of funding in particular and what we're doing to pilots and business models to transition existing university presses to models for open access books because the fundamental truth is however you look at this problem book processing charges do not scale well or fairly among libraries and the way you can think about this is if you had say a hundred people in a room and you needed a hundred pounds to run an event the two ways you could do that is you can ask everybody in the room to pay one pound and they can afford that and everybody pays their pound and the event can run because essentially you've got the money you need if you think about the analogy to a book processing charge it's equivalent to just going to the speaker and asking them upfront for a hundred pounds in order to speak and often the money is not there it's not with that speaker it's distributed among the many actors in the system and that's exactly what we have in the library funding landscape for books the sales system works relatively well at distributing costs between many different libraries the book processing charge model is incredibly problematic and starts to exclude people based on their inability to pay them I should say also though that the benefits of open access should not be thought of in financial savings terms but really in terms of the usage of these artifacts we often get hung up on the humanities being unwanted unloved the social sciences unread and so on but a good case study from one of the presses we're working with at the cu press was that during just march to june 2020 they made 279 titles openly accessible on project news these titles were downloaded 350 000 times over just those few months from 129 countries and seven of the top 10 downloads were from titles that were over 10 years old so the back list saw extensive usage and you know every time presses do this and make their books openly accessible we suddenly see explosive explosions in the usage levels of these titles which to me speaks to an unmet opportunity there is an audience for this work we're just not doing the best we can at the moment to get these works in front of the people who would like to read them and that's where open access for monographs could be of great use should also point out that we're dealing with quite a strange landscape here compared to the journal space lots of people have been familiar with the transition of journals to open access models and we can get a good profile of what that landscape looks like from the directory of open access journals but if you compare the directory of open access books to the directory of open access journals you quickly see that the open access books market has many smaller players with publications in multiple languages across a broad spectrum of subject areas and this is an infrastructure that is valued in different disciplinary contexts so there are a large number of small to medium-sized university presses for example who are intensely valued in particular subject areas you know they're not the mega presses of Cambridge Oxford MIT but nonetheless they will be the specialist press in a particular area they'll have commissioning expertise they will have a value among disciplinary practices and need support and I'm going to propose today that we need to think of supporting these types of mission-driven presses as though they were part of the research infrastructure for the humanities borrowing from the language that Charles Watkinson has been using in the US for a while and often people come back on that and say well why why do we need to support this in infrastructure why do we need to think about supporting presses holistically rather than just buying the books that we want once we know that they're successful and the basic answer is that if we could predict in advance and oppress which books are important which books are the ones that will go on to make a difference in the world then we'd have solved a massive problem in research which is simply that we can't do that we don't know ahead of time which bits of research are the things that will change the world that are the important ones that take off just by way of analogy to the fiction space Samuel Beckett Nobel Prize-winning novelist and and playwright had his first manuscript rejected 18 times by presses before it was picked up and we have the same in the research space you can't have the cream without the milk and presses need to publish a wide range of materials so that we can find out where the where that important research is and that's why I think we need to start thinking of this this thing that needs to be continuously supported rather than just buying the titles once we know that they're successful it's quite an exciting time though for open access monographs in the last year or so we've seen a number of experimental business models come forward piloting the way that we might produce away monographs without resorting to book processing charges and this is a little simplified but I'm going to talk about them as though they were part of three different strata so at the very top end of mega presses we have MIT presses direct to open scheme which came through which is a front list unlocking mechanism where libraries subscribe to the front list at the press and if they get enough subscribers the entire front list for that year can be made openly accessible at Cambridge University Press also launched its flip to open flip it open scheme which is a model where once a book has recovered its costs and gone beyond the certain threshold of sales they will make those books open access um that's great in many ways um but it does mean that only the books that were successful rather than research monographs are getting the benefits of open access now those presses have institutional subsidy supports they have often large grants to support this work that they're doing at the moment and I don't want to knock that you know it's good that they're doing this but there are also presses at the small to medium end here who are in a very different boat so I also want first to tip my hat to the scholar led born open access presses puncton books open book publishers mattering press uh who have instigated membership schemes to support their operations over the past few years so these are collective models where libraries contribute a membership fee to support those presses ongoing operations so that they don't have to charge book processing charges and that's great and by the way my experience of working with open book publishers and puncton books for two of my works was incredibly positive as good as any university press I've ever been with so just to put in a good word for them I'm going to talk for the rest of my sort of five five minutes now though about what we do with these small to medium sized university presses and what we're doing at the coping project to come up with a model that works for them these presses often receive some but not much subsidy from their host institutions um and they're really falling in that um gap between these two spaces of scholar led and large well funded academic presses traditionally they'd put their titles into knowledge unlatched and that would be the way they do it but we obviously know that knowledge unlatched is now owned by Wiley and so that may not be as value aligned as it was in the past with library goals we also know that these presses need models that don't put their entire operation at a jeopardy just to try something in the oa space and that's the model that we've come up with at coping for these presses which is called opening the future I'm going to talk to you for a few minutes about now so opening the future is a backlist subscription model for opening the front list at a press and the idea is that presses put together packages of their titles so the central european university press one of our partners has presses in history politics and slavic studies for example and there's 50 books in each package libraries can subscribe to those 50 books and that's just a subscription there's nothing open access about that it's 50 books for your local collection what's different about the model is that the publisher uses the revenue from that subscription to make the front list openly accessible one book at a time as they hit the revenue threshold for that book and in this way what we're trying to do is give libraries something that they can buy with their traditional acquisitions budget but that by stealth almost ends up funding open access and that's how we can start to see a transition from funding books for a local collection to funding the building of a global collection that everybody wants now i'm not naive enough to think that humanities and social sciences are well funded and that we can charge the earth for this so the smallest universities in this scheme are paying just 300 pounds for those books to subscribe to and the largest just a thousand so half a single apc to support a scheme like this and our target is to get to the point where these presses can produce their front lists their research monograph front lists entirely openly accessible so the collection grows by 25 titles every year we're working with project muse for metadata so this is high quality mark kbart with counter compliance statistics and we'll also talk to you later today a bit about our system totes at copin which is an open metadata dissemination system but i don't want to muddy the water at this point what's important is that with a collective model like this as more members join the cost goes down and if we can get to our target number of libraries we're looking at just 10 pounds per library per monograph and the front list of those monographs is all open access so really this is extremely cost effective way compared to a book processing charge of supporting these presses to convert their front list to open the accessible models so we're piloting this with Liverpool University Press and the Central European University Press so two presses that have extensive backlists and can support this type of system for up to 40 years actually with with their backlist the backlist is drm free it's massively concurrent access so you can do what you like with it we're not putting any lockdown restrictions on those titles and after three years it's perpetual access for libraries to the books they're subscribing to so there's no hidden locks on these books they're just available for researchers to download and use as they see fit and you get perpetual access at the end of that term but what i like about this model and this is what we built in in the design is that we're trying to work incrementally here lots of models have set their sights on all or nothing and said if we hit our library membership threshold we'll make our entire list open access and that's you know a laudable goal but what it often means is we don't hit the target and then we get nothing instead in opening the future we unlock one book at a time and it's simply the next book coming through production so there's none of this question about are they selecting the worst titles to make them open access and palming them off on libraries it's simply this book is about to go into production we haven't said whether it's open access or for sale yet and if we've got the revenue from 10 memberships to this system we'll make that next book open access and we're also signaling that clearly to libraries so there's no accidental double dipping where a library goes in and buys a title but it's already funded to be open access so clear metadata signaling in advance and a clear warning ahead of time for which titles are OA and which are for purchase what this model is not and what we're trying to get away from is a read and publish deal so we're very used to these now in the journal space seeing transformative agreements where it's for researchers at your institution to publish open access we're trying to change the way we think about this so that anybody who goes to the press can publish open access without a book processing charge by converting the entire front list of the press to open access we get around this problem of is this book from our researcher it's just that the entire press is working on an open access basis so that's my kind of introduction to the policy landscape and what we're doing business model wise try to convert open access existing university presses to OA models and my take home message for this audience today though is that we're going to be talking about a lot of pilots we're going to be talking about a lot of experiments and things we're doing at this time to try to change things and it's very tempting at this point I've especially given the pandemic budget constraints to sit back and think let's see what happens and the problem is that if we sit back and just see what happens rather than supporting these pilots it's going to be another decade before we just have another set of pilots and another set of pilots and the pilots will never become what we do as basic practice so I guess my plea is what can we do is a plea and a question what can we do to make this more than just a pilot phase and make it the beginning of a true transition to open access for monographs the beginning of a different way of doing things in these disciplines I'm going to now hand over to my colleague Joe Deville who's going to talk a bit more about the infrastructural side of what we're doing at Copham and the way that insects with scholar led yes didn't we say that we'd also just go around the room and just ask everyone just just one point from their breakout sessions I think that's right so yeah thanks very much Martin so yeah we'll begin with that I just think I mean we don't spend too long doing it because obviously time is of the essence and if your breakout was anything like mine you know we could have talked for at least another half an hour but anyway and perhaps I'll just begin with one thought one thing that came up in our discussions which was this kind of question of how libraries navigate the this changing landscape where they are being presented with more and more models for open access and where you know the ways that likely budgets are allocated might be changing in some cases and not in other cases and I think for me what was most kind of hopeful is hearing from some institutions where that sort of traditional separation between kind of contact acquisition and sporting open access is breaking down and you're actually having more and more conversations across silos and ultimately I'm thinking you know in the round about what do we want to support and and why without just having to sort of say oh we can only support open access from this defined open access pot we did it from one institution that has such a pot and you know and they're there which is fantastic but they're now increasingly struggling to fund because they're getting so many and asks for from that pot so I think that's a really crucial thing that needs to happen from our perspective in libraries is that those silos break down and it's good to hear that in some cases it's starting to happen so Martin perhaps over to you sorry everyone you can hear hear a little bit more from me we had a wide ranging discussion in our breakout room but I guess the the cool things that came through were it's helpful to start to normalize expenditure on OA monographs as expenditure on monographs and getting beyond this separation of scholarly communications from acquisitions budgets which seemed a really important and recurrent theme but also you know thinking about this in two ways I want to highlight that another conversation we have is about accessibility as an overlooked aspect of OA and ensuring that actually access for everyone is really part of what we're doing here and not just thinking about accessing monetary terms but also in terms of disability accessibility and so on thanks Martin and Lucy yeah so we touched on the topic of different pots of money as well and but a point that we were circling around quite a lot was this idea of tipping points and what is the the thing that will trigger the tipping point into OA for monographs so there was quite a lot of discussion about policy and a feeling that you know policy moves particularly the next ref are going to be important but there's also a certain amount of anxiety around that for less well-resourced universities and you know if the model is BPCs then how is that going to be funded and even if it's lots of small you know little pots of money that are required for schemes which charge less than a BPC still that's a financial commitment and how do you balance those different things especially if there's quite a lot of them so that was kind of what came out of our discussions thank you really interesting here thanks Lucy and Tom I won't go into too much detail because actually we talked about a lot of the things you all mentioned I'll just bring up one sentence that stuck in my head from a colleague at Leeds who said so much of what you can do is dictated by what your institution is doing and so even if you and your immediate colleagues know it's the right thing to do you may not actually be able to do it in terms of supporting OA. Yeah perfect thank you very much and welcome welcome to the felines in the room. This is this is Pod. Toby. I think all of or most of what has been covered in our recommendations has also been touched upon in what you've spoken about so maybe I'll just keep it short here and yeah. Yeah well it's good to hear that there are some resonances between the different rooms so that's that's good okay all right then so yeah now I'm going to move on to talk about some of the work that that I'm doing on the Coglin project Martin's already sort of trailed it in a way in talking about the the challenges that face and smaller to medium publishers and securing OA funding and I've been working with colleagues with I'll enjoy from Hudson Books and other colleagues Rupert Gatti from Open Book Publishers and others on developing some solutions or hopefully we hopefully solutions to some of these challenges so I'm just going to share my slides here we go let's have a look okay let's go that should work okay right and can you see that and someone told me can you confirm that that's you can see that okay yes okay thank you very much okay so what I'm going to be talking about today is a new organization that is in the process of being founded title called the Open Book Collective Martin's also going to be speaking later on in the presentation about a infrastructure development that's connected to the Open Book Collective which is another kind of output of the Coglin project which in a way stands on its own but also provides a really important function for the work of the Open Book Collective okay here's a very quick overview of what the Open Book Collective is and what it stands for so as it sort of says on the left there you know what the Open Book Collective tries to do is to bring together different entities in the open publishing landscape publishers publishing service providers and then also research institutions so like Martin was talking about you know another initiative that tries to bridge the work of research institutions and those that are developing content and what we want to do is is is harness I guess the power of collaboration across these different stakeholders to secure the future of of open access book length and long form scholarship on the right there are some of the values of this new organization so a care and curation of high quality academic books a commitment to biblio diversity and collaboration and resource sharing over competition networked community building over profit driven centralization horizontal working relationships over exclusive forms of hierarchization and growing and safeguarding open accessibility to and reuse of academic books for global readers without technical or economic barriers so you already get a sense from that about I guess what some of the values are that are informing the Open Book Collective and that is reflected in lots of different ways in in our governance structure and the kinds of initiatives that we want to support via via the collective but I'll come back to some of that what I'm going to do now is move on to thinking about practically what the Open Book Collective will do and the Open Book Collective to be clear is going to do different things but at the center of the Open Book Collective's work is a platform that tries to address some of the challenges of small to medium publishers and also service providers in securing funding for their work okay so the particular challenge that we kind of began with in the project is this you have as Martin already mentioned some small academic led presses that have existing library membership programs and they offer those library memberships programs in particular to libraries and universities and if they're lucky they get financial support in return and there are other initiatives that do something similar infrastructural initiatives so for example Director of Open Access Books has a library membership scheme and sometimes they're successful in in securing subscriptions for those schemes however there are a number of publishers in this kind of landscape and also infrastructure providers that don't have library membership schemes so matching press the press that I'm working with you know we're very very small published so we publish let's say an average of three to four books a year it actually varies a lot you know one year it's one year one book next year it's eight you know nine books we published in one year makes it hard for us to offer our own individual library membership scheme because we're small and our output is variable and so what what can we do for those these kind of publishers to help them secure their funding as well as making easy for those slightly larger publishers to reach out to universities as we've already heard about in the breakout rooms and when it comes to assessing the different initiatives that already exist out there there are some real no sorry when it comes to the open access initiatives themselves and doing their outreach work for those that do have programs they there are challenges so the outreach work is highly labor intensive the outreach tends to be geographically skewed so initiatives tend to focus on the you know the country that they're based in and where they have networks and so on the outreach rewards are uncertain and what that means is although library membership schemes can be a useful tool um it's nonetheless you still have bpc based publishing models at the heart of many open access publishers you know punkdom and and open book publishers still take fees they don't make it a mandatory requirement for publishing open access but a lot of their work is funded through fees that they ask authors to see if they can secure this places barriers to entry for for smaller initiatives and like matching like matching press and also for larger initiatives as i say these the rewards are uncertain the situation also generates and challenges for libraries and universities so there are inconsistencies in how initiatives present themselves as we've already heard about it's really labor intensive to assess the library to assess the increasing number of asks that they're getting from initiatives and obviously as we've also in my breakout session heard about you know libraries want evidence of how a different initiative might be relevant to them to their faculty to their students to their priorities and what we at the open book collective are trying to do is try to address some of these problems so we're starting with the same challenge to some extent you know we have on the one side we have publishers and with library membership programs on the other we have libraries and universities but what we're doing with the open book collective is setting up a financial intermediary so what we will do is we will advertise library membership programs on the platform for which we will then manage the subscriptions and direct payment to individual initiatives whether publishers or infrastructure providers well also do on the platform is allowed a formation of new collectives so for the presses like my own like matching press for mason press which is the other logo below it and as well as perhaps some other infrastructure infrastructure initiatives we will make it possible for the platform to offer collective packages and to receive revenue for those collective packages so allow these smaller initiatives to still potentially receive some revenue without being beholden and to providing you know a kind of very very regular form of output so that being part of a collective will at will allow individual output to vary but you'll still have and the kind of a consistency of output across a group and will also potentially host other types of presses on the platform martin talked about opening the future we hope and that we will when at the point of launch have some of the opening the future presses on the platform offering their library membership schemes and potentially other open access books and book initiatives we are actually in conversation with a number and it may well be that some of you here in the room might be the kind of initiative that could benefit from being part of the open book collective and if that is the case I'd really encourage you to get in touch with us and to have to start those conversations because yeah we're really keen to to build a a collective a group of publishers and infrastructure providers that have offerings on the platform worth saying as well that of course the platform will allow payments to pass via via third parties and consortium membership organizations for example so that's the kind of financial intermediation part of the platform but it does something else it also provides information initiatives groups of initiatives provide information to the platform and then that information is then passed to to libraries or to their to their representatives and I guess the the point here is that what we're trying to do is we're trying to make this information easier for libraries to deal with so to ensure that information is clear it's consistent there's clear information on the packages that are being offered clear information on the values of different initiatives how their structure and from the library's perspective that the metadata that these initiatives and when it comes to publishers and supply is consistent that there is an easy way of browsing the catalogues of different initiatives so we'll have a shared catalog based on the the tote back end that Martin's going to talk about in the second for those publishers that put them information in this catalog and crucially as well information on the local relevance of initiatives to institutions so that the institution can get a sense of how the the content for example of a publisher might relate to the priorities of their faculty of their staff so hopefully one thing it will do is make it easier for libraries to understand the relevance of particular institutions it also helped with invoicing contracting all these different ways that we can help make the process of supporting different initiatives less painful okay i'm just going to hand over to martin now i'm going to talk more about tote and the back end upon which open book collective depends to a significant degree thanks joe um there's a real problem with open access books that seems completely ironic which is that the metadata for them and their discoverability is often extremely poor and this is not usually actually the faults of presses who are providing often high quality metadata but it goes through several layers of aggregator who tend to strip it out by the time it gets to libraries a good example of this is simply the fact that we can't easily put a flag saying that a particular work is open access for instance and that then leads to situations where libraries end up accidentally purchasing more types that they've already funded to be open access so one of the things we've been working on at the coping project is an open metadata dissemination system for books that is built from the ground up to accommodate open access books their affordances and characteristics it's an open api and it's using open standards open metadata and open source code and this integrates either directly with library discoverability systems but we're also in conversations with the directory of open access books and our open to ensure that presses using this system can filter their data into those systems which are already integrated with library discoverability and cataloging systems this also plugs a huge infrastructure gap in the lots of presses end up using systems like books for onyx which are commercial solutions to give them metadata feeds that that are in the formats that libraries need we think we can do this much better if we if we work from scratch thinking about open access as the default and so that's where tote comes in and you can see more about that at tote.pub t-h-o-t-h.pub where you can explore some sample catalogs and and see the kind of records that we're now able to export and really this is going to be a huge boon for presses that can't afford those commercial solutions and also gives them the power to shape their own catalogs and ways that will filter through accurately to libraries okay joe how's that yeah excellent thanks very much and yeah just to note to say the matching press my press we've just input our data into tote and yeah it's you know it's really really incredibly invaluable for us to help you know us manage our metadata much more effectively than we were doing before it was a very in a very amateurish way I confess okay yeah just now moving on to think talking a little bit about the OBC business model and it's maybe relevant for some of you may not be relevant for some of you but hopefully it'll just give you a sense of how we're planning to fund our work okay so the way it works practically is that the publisher or service provider will offer their membership program via the open book collective and the library then potentially will support that individual initiative perhaps more than one initiative and then will so financially you know pay for that and support and the on top of that is then added the OBC processing fee which I'll talk about more in a second and then the OBC collects that membership program revenue with the processing fee and on top and then distributes it so the publishing or service provider will receive membership income from the OBC less than some fees and the library will then receive not then but you know over the course of their membership at different points the information that they need from the publisher whether that be metadata updates about their work new publications and so on as well as for example for the likes of an opening the future press and if they join the platform access to the relevant backlist the OBC then distributes the income it received into two funds then there is the OBC management fund is the fund that funds the the work of the open book collective so one of the things that the open book collective does is it conducts outreach on behalf of publishers and a lot of the funds that we will collect will go towards funding that outreach so we will do the work of going to library speaking to them about the different library membership program packages that we have on the platform seeing if they fit with institutional priorities seeing if it's something that and a library will be willing to and support and there's details there about how we then allocate money to that particular fund and and then a smaller portion of the money then goes to what we call the OBC development fund this is a separate fund that allows us to support new publishing initiative new infrastructure providers or to help existing providers improve their processes make their work more efficient and so this is in keeping with our remit as an organization not just to be a kind of financial intermediary and an information provider an actor within the landscape of open publishing that genuinely supports a range of different initiatives in a in a global context as I come on to say in a second we will be founded as a UK and charity so that's in keeping with our charitable remit here are some of the kind of numbers and so the the processing fee that I mentioned is five percent on top of the membership program so you know if there's a one thousand pound subscription the library will pay one thousand and fifty pounds and then from the publisher's perspective there are the standard fee is to retain five percent actually five percent from year two onwards and but twelve point five percent in the first year and the reason for that is because that reflects I guess the amount of effort that it takes to get a library to subscribe in the in the first year and after as they come to renew that effort decreases okay how much more time we've got four more minutes some quick words on what we think the value of this new initiative will be so for the scholarly community and our and open access in general you know this provides a sustainable gradual funding funding model similar to what Martin was talking about in the first session not not dependent on hitting fixed annual targets providing the new revenue source within the oa ecosystem that can grow over time it becomes easier to publish open access for publishers as a result helping them transition away from bpc based publishing models this is an openly accessible portal I should say I didn't really have time to talk about that before but of course you know anyone can browse this they can learn about different initiatives learn about their values learn about their priorities in one simple to use space as well as browse a shared catalog so of the initiatives that have their metadata in in tote allowing a greater diversity and open access you know in line with those values of biblio diversity that I talked about before meaning that both small and larger open access publishers can engage with libraries you know from matching presses will be completely transformative it's completely impossible for us at the moment to generate any funding from libraries but this provides a really potentially valuable new avenue more robust oa infrastructures we think it's really important to support not just publishers in the world of open access but infrastructures and yes as martin said we might want to think about publishers themselves as infrastructures but there are also these other infrastructural initiatives that are utterly crucial for the long-term sustainability of open access publishing the director of open access books tote for example perhaps even the open book collective in itself value for publishers and service providers I think I've talked about some extent already so I'll skip past that in the interest of time value for those who are supporting oa institutions so I think it become easier to demonstrate the local value of supporting open access and initiatives so by providing information on how individual initiatives might be relevant to your priorities it becomes hopefully easier for you know to to speak to colleagues about exactly breaking down those silos in budgets for example reduce administration making it easier to manage invoicing contracting and so on and so forth fitting making it easier to communicate how you're fitting with the institutional strategies supporting and diverse initiatives and also providing you know more open open titles very quick word on governance as I mentioned that OBC will shortly be registered as a charity in the UK I expect that to be completed in next few weeks there are then different boards involved in the management of the book collective probably won't go into all the details here but they're on the screen there the key principle is that this is a member led organization what we really want to avoid is the situation that's happened in the past with some initiatives where the library community gets excited about a new open access infrastructure and then that infrastructure then becomes commercial and loses some of the values that were so exciting in the first place but you want to make sure this is an organization controlled by members so that that can't happen here's a timeline beta by April launch early summer we will be communicating more about that in due course I just wanted in the final minute if I have time if the present if the organizers allow me just to give you a very quick sense of what this will look like so let's just quickly see if I can do that yeah here we go this is a not the live website but some designs have been created by our designer so this will kind of it will be what it'll look like and you'll go onto the site and then you can depending on who you are you can take different kinds of action as a library you can start to build a subscription package as a publisher you can find out how to to join and just skip through some of these slides and this is what a kind of building your quotation page you'll be able to support collectives composed of different initiatives you'll be able to support individual initiatives and that will then add to a kind of basket and just skip to the basket page there's a collective catalog individual book pages then here's the basket page sorry and so it'll go back there it'll provide you a total quotation for supporting different initiatives and if an initiative is already in a collective package it will then remove that from your quotation so you don't accidentally have a kind of double dipping scenario you'll add some details and then we will be in touch with you to discuss further and to deal with all the contracting stuff the system actually does also work out the contracting in the back end as well okay I think that's it for me really look forward to your thoughts your feedback on this proposition on anything that I've talked about thank you so we've just got now five minutes really to to wrap up this session and then give people a chance to stretch their legs and go elsewhere but thanks so much everyone in the breakout rooms for contributing and giving your feedback on this I think we're just going to do a quick summary go around the rooms to see if there are commonalities or shared points for my group really what came through quite strongly was that the OBC could be a really useful framework for comparing the offers that are here we need a combination though of thought we need to think about what metrics we're using and how sensible they are one of the comments stuck in my mind was we don't have sensible metrics for making these decisions yet and we need a balance between narrative and structured information that goes back to libraries on what they're supporting and what they've achieved as a result of that support because the academic voice is often missing from these discussions but should be more prominently featured if we want this to be carrying the hearts and minds of the communities we're trying to serve thank you so I'll pass over to Lucy thanks Martin so we covered quite a lot of different topics in our session but one of them that stuck out to me was that OBC's one of its strong sort of selling points or you know reasons to support it is that it can simplify things for libraries but that there are some questions about if there are initiatives on OBC which also have separate ways to get support from libraries how can that be made clear and will those institutions or initiatives or publishers communicate that back to libraries so that they can know that when they're assessing and making a decision and we also talked a bit towards the end about sort of different types of value proposition that OBC presents so both kind of a sort of ethical or equitable value or you know kind of scholarly value and also a kind of monetary value and how you kind of juggle those messages and the idea that you know really we kind of need to be presenting both because both issues are important to libraries in different ways and important to libraries and communicating upwards as well so they kind of came out of our discussions brilliant thank you Lucy did you get Toby oh yes sure I think our discussions have also been quite fruitful regarding the first hand thoughts on the OBC some of the participants felt that the presentation is or the the OBC as an overall offer is quite new to them so it's rather difficult to give like a direct reaction for them to see if they can support that or not but they definitely feel that it be good to support smaller initiatives and the proposed model seems to be an interesting way to learn more about. Also a very practical question that came up in relation to that is the OBC's relation to GISC so just the very practical question of how libraries can then route their subscriptions with the OBC and we explored what the OBC is looking at there so for example Graham who has been on my room mentioned that GISC has been involved from the start of course in coping overall and in the open book collective gathering of thoughts and the conceptual building the platform and we are in active discussions with the GISC licensing team to get the subscription manager lined up for that so I think the reaction from our participants has been quite positive on that aspect because it would of course help them to streamline the management of subscriptions through the OBC with the GISC subscription manager maybe also to point to another thought that came up in relation to TOAT and I think people in our group have been quite positive about the notion that the records we are producing with TOAT are CC0 and also and was noted that libraries for some of the libraries there is a big issue with the quality of existing records in four open monographs and so TOAT might be an interesting venture to follow up on in that respect to provide higher quality metadata that would help their systems as well. Thank you I'm going to go quickly to Tom and I think Joe's summarizing his in the chat because we want to give people a couple of minutes between sessions but Tom did you just want to close us out? Oh an honor thank you Martin so I'll keep mine very brief and say that we had a really wide-ranging discussion that touched on a lot of what you all said and one takeaway for me was the concept of where this where GISC begins and ends and someone said you know is essentially said is this like a fresh skin for the GISC licensing subscriptions manager which was a really interesting point that we perhaps need to get right in our comms. I'll leave it there. Brilliant. Perhaps I can just say as the final word I won't summarize my discussion but yeah just to say thank you so much everyone and you know I would really encourage any of you that want to stay in touch to yeah to sign up to our mailing list and if there anybody is in the room who is a publisher or represents a university press or works as a small publisher and you think that it might OBC might be relevant for you in terms of potentially for example having a package on the platform we did now or some future moment please do get in touch with me and we're already talking to some publishers around exactly that and yeah thanks so much for all your contributions has brought incredibly beneficial I think for me personally and I'm sure for all of us.