 Welcome everyone. Thank you very much for joining us today. My name is Lidia Uzil, I'm the Associate University Librarian for Research Resources and Scholarly Communication at University of California, Santa Barbara. I'm also the Chair of the Board of Stewards of the Open Book Collective. I'm here today with my colleague, Livy Snyder. Livy is the Outreach Associate for the Open Book Collective and she is also the Associate Director of Community and Library Outreach and Booktube Books. We are delighted to be here today and we want to thank CNI for giving us the opportunity to present on a very exciting project, Open Book Collective. We hope that this project will have a significant impact on the open access landscape and the publishing ecosystem for open access monographs in the future. So the team of our presentation today is Open Book Collective. Collective paths towards an open and sustainable monograph future. Looking at the current state of the publishing ecosystem, we see that the open access publishing movement has been at our library doorstep for a couple of decades. It has been accelerated by the recent proliferation of open access policy mandates nationally and internationally and by recent developments in infrastructure support for open access publishing. These are very important milestones in advancing open access. However, as we all know, monographs continue to lag behind journals in terms of open access publishing, infrastructure and distribution. Journals continue to be at the forefront of the open access transition and manual funded university presses and also commercial presses are actively experimenting with open book models. However, looking at the publishing landscape as a whole, there is a very long tail of small non-profit scholar-led presses that are not so well funded and that are often left out and unable to participate in the open access movements. There are of course various reasons why these presses are excluded from the open access transformation, including obviously cultural barriers, lack of funding, issue related to tenure and promotion. And most importantly, lack of necessary expertise and often infrastructure allowing them to flip their publishing model to open access. But this presentation is not about analyzing the root of this problem. Our goal is to present some forward looking solutions to this important challenge. To successfully create a new path towards an open and sustainable monograph future, especially in humanities and social science content, and particularly for the long tail of small non-profit scholar-led and not so well funded publishers, especially in humanities and social science, the global community of publishers, infrastructure providers and libraries must develop new open access publishing and funding models supported by fully open and sustainable infrastructures. This is precisely the issue that the Open Book Collective has been working and we are currently working on, and on which we will reflect today in our presentation. But before we present the Open Book Collective in detail, let me take a step back and give you a brief history of the Open Book Collection formation. The Open Book Collective is an output of the COPIM project. Community-led open publication infrastructures for monographs launched in 2019 and founded at 3.6 million of British pounds by the Arcadia and Research England Development Fund. COPIM was a three-year project that ended in 2022 and that developed a variety of open infrastructures for open book publishing. It included TOT, which is an open metadata management system and also dissemination platform that enables open access presses to create rich metadata following existing library standards. TOT also automates the metadata dissemination into library integrated system and other platforms. Opening the Future is the second output of the COPIM project. It is a subscribe to open type of revenue and business model that enable open access, non-open access presses to use their revenue basically to flip their content to open access. Currently, Opening the Future is used by Central European University Press and also Liverpool University Press, but this model can be used by presses internationally. COPIM developed a toolkit and also standard agreements that are currently in use with GISC and RIRASIS. Finally, the third output, the Community Governance Model for the Open Book Collective and the Open Book Collective itself. It is an international partnership of open access publishers, open access infrastructure providers and also libraries and other non-profit organizations. The University of California, Santa Barbara, was a founding partner of the COPIM project and I've been serving as the COPII on this project focusing primarily on developing COPIM governance procedures and also organizational structure for the coordination and administrative support of COPIM's community-owned infrastructures. The UCSB library is very strongly supporting open access monographs and other initiatives, especially with non-profit and scholar-led presses. In addition to supporting the existing UC system-wide open access agreements and other initiatives with commercial and non-commercial publishers, our goal is to support an open, inclusive, diverse and sustainable publishing ecosystem in which all knowledge producers are equally empowered to publish and disseminate their research without barriers. To accomplish this goal, we decided to support COPIM and now to support Open Book Collective. That's basically the history of the Open Book Collective regarding the future. In March 2022, the Arcadia and the Research England Development Fund awarded 5.8 million of British pounds for the Open Book Future project, which is designed to support the Open Book Collective and also to expand and accelerate COPIM's open access infrastructures. And we will discuss the Open Book Future project at the end of this presentation. So what's the Open Book Collective and what are our main goals and objectives? Established in the UK as a charitable and non-profit organization, the Open Book Collective is a partnership and also a collective of open access publishers, infrastructure providers and also libraries. Our mission is to support an ecosystem for open access books that can counter the existing commercial model, which is as we all know is often elitist and exclusionary when it comes to publishing, distribution and readership, especially when looking at the global publishing landscape and the long tail of small non-profit and scholar-led presses. We want to counter the ecosystem that is reliant on infrastructure and also that is often compromised by unsustainable publishing and funding models. The project mission is to support a new open access book publishing ecosystem that is equitable, community governed and built on sustainable business models and community-owned and fully open infrastructures. Basically the OBC provides support for small presses, scholar-led presses who need collective aid because they don't have the expertise, they don't have the infrastructure, they don't have the finances to support their open access transition on their own and we want to support them because we want to continue, we want them to continue to thrive. At the present moment we have three different types of members in our collective. We have born open access publishers that are fully open access. We also have transitional open access publishers that have closed or partially closed catalog but they want to move to be 75% or 100% open access and finally we have open publishing service and infrastructure providers. For example, open monograph press, a platform that was developed by the Public Knowledge Project or DOAB and OAPEN, a global repository of open access books are already members of the collective. The open book collective is rooted in the powerful idea of the scaling small. We strongly believe that small independent and non-profit publishers and scholar-led presses can be very successful in their open access transformation when they work together, when they work in collaboration with each other and when they are supported by libraries and also open infrastructures. Small presses do not have to grow exponentially in order to survive if they can establish a supportive network of mutual reliance and the open community-led infrastructures developed by the COPIN project and also that are currently part of the open book collective are practical expression of how the idea of scaling small can work in practice and I will now pass to Livy who will give you some more details on the open book collective. The ethos of collaboration permeates the entire governance of the OBC. The governance of the OBC is membership-shaped, community-led, democratically representative, equitable and transparent and it models a true globality that doesn't prioritize the global north. Our board members come from the US, UK, Europe, Africa and South America. The OBC has adopted an association organizational model. The existing structure empowers all members to directly participate in the OBC's governance and related decision-making processes. The OBC's trustees serve as stewards as they are partly selected from the members of the OBC and represent the main stakeholder groups called caucuses. As a result, the OBC organization and its governance are made up of three bodies, the General Assembly of Custodians, the Board of Stewards and the Membership Committee. Ultimately, the governance of OBC has been designed to empower a unique collaborative community of OA creators, researchers, libraries and other funders with vested interests in growing the landscape of non-propriety OA initiatives and OA experts and scholarly communications and open access. The OBC is thus not just a financial intermediary between OA initiatives and funders but instead is an independent and mutually reliant community of experts and organization all with vested interests in the transformation of academic book publishing, working together to move the needle toward a fully open public commons and away from the enclosure of knowledge of traditional proprietary publishing. At the heart of the OBC's work is a community-owned online platform designed to support new relationships between libraries and OA publishers. For OA publishers and infrastructure providers, the OBC's platform provides a venue to promote their OA programs and manage the funding they receive from supporting libraries and other knowledge providers. For libraries interested in supporting OA book initiatives, the platform provides a centralized discovery of various OA membership programs and related offers tied to publisher collectives, individual publishers and publishing service or infrastructure providers. Through the platform, libraries can find, assess, bundle and commit to financially support OA membership packages and initiatives offered by the collective. Our shared catalog, which you can see on the right, just an assortment of our all the publishers books, it's integrated into the OBC website through the open metadata management system that Lydia mentioned previously called TOTE. Any publisher who joins the OBC will have their books in this catalog, which currently comprises the works of Punkton Books, Open Book Publishers, Mason Press with books from Mattering Press, African Minds, White Horse Press, and Media Studies Press, Dot Press. This catalog will grow each time a publisher joins. The OBC supports S2O and non-BPC based open access funding and business models that incorporate infrastructural innovations and cost reductions through streamlined operating processes, production workflows, and economic efficiencies. We don't have much time to discuss all the relevant details, so please visit our site to learn more. With the OBC, the funding scheme is fairly straightforward while also being noteworthy for its distributive costs. I want to highlight that around 90% of the OBC's income goes directly to publishers and service provider members, with the rest covering and the operating costs and contributing to something called the Collective Development Fund intended to help small open access publishers or infrastructure providers sustain or expand their capabilities and operations. Still in the early stages of development, the fund's primary goal is to support global biodiversity by enabling innovation for new OA book initiatives through small grants designed to support small, not-for-profit publishers to be more sustainable in the future and to better align with the technical and editorial standards of the larger open knowledge community. The Collective Development Fund will also be used to create toolkits and learning modules and webinars for presses and infrastructure providers to learn how to run a press, including setting up its business management, how to manage workflows, how to manage metadata and analytics, how to disseminate and aggregate OA content and data, how to create ebook preservation protocols, or how to meet international open data standards. So in practice there are several benefits for libraries supporting the OBC aggregation. It's an aggregation and discovery platform. Our web platform, which I just previously discussed, features a shared catalog including all the books of all the presses in our Collective, including individual publishers as well as member packages for groups and publishers, infrastructure providers, and organization. Relevance of the content. When you go to our web platform you see richly detailed information for each membership initiative, what their missions and values are, their business models, their costs of production, output of books per year, tools under development, subject areas, and their ongoing progress. We conduct due diligence for presses and infrastructure providers. We have a membership committee that evaluates all initiative offerings and their offerings. So there are criteria for joining the OBC to ensure that peer review practices, pricing models, governance structure, and performed are all performed in accordance with our membership criteria. Lastly, workflow. Our platform streamlines the subscription process. So rather than managing dozens of subscriptions with individual presses, the OBC provides a single place to manage them all in one organization. There's an important economy of scale by consolidating and the licensing and invoicing and including support from third-party partners such as Lyrisis for processing payments. So the OBC is part of a larger holistic vision for the OA book ecosystem supported by the Arcadia and Research England Development Fund who have together committed up to 5.8 million pounds to continue the work of the pioneering COPEN project including the financial support of the OBC. So it's scheduled to run through April 2026. The OBF is a new project that builds on the achievements of the COPEN project with expanded and a more global team including the Continental Platform, University of Cape Town, CLO, Books DOAB, the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative Co-Key, among others. The OBC and OBF will partner on expanding critical infrastructures for OA book publishing including the OBC's platform enhancements such as multilingual capabilities, dynamic currency conversion, and usability improvements. Expanding the OBC's information hub, sometimes we just called the info hub, containing practical and advocacy resources for libraries, publishers, and academics including expert advice informed by the collaboration with the Palomera project on removing barriers for libraries to support the OBC's funding models particularly in research funder policies and mandates. Toolkits for smaller and scholar-led open access publishers with a pilot project already in development we have literally just sent it off last week for peer review it will showcase experimental books and publishing workflows used by partnering presses. In addition the OBF deepens and further accelerates the output of the COPEN project including developing the TOAT archiving network which identifies and examines the critical challenges associated with archiving and preserving open access monographs particularly those published by independent small and scholar-led presses. So the future of the OBC is entirely driven by the ethos of seeking, promoting, and supporting Biblio diversity in the open monograph publishing system. The OBC and OBF collaborate closely on amplifying Biblio diverse and equitable community-led approaches to OA book publishing. In addition to strengthening the existing network in the UK and North America our strategy for the next three years is to seek strategic partnerships with publishers, universities, and infrastructure providers in diverse national and linguistic contexts particularly in Africa, Australasia, and Latin America to support the small presses and humanities and social science particularly the long tail of small nonprofit and scholar-led publishers. We will invite them to join the OBC and provide them with the necessary infrastructural support to fully embrace the OA transformation. So how will this be done in practice? Well for the first half of 2024 we will be running a series of events with operas and represent and OA scholarly publishers across the EU. We will be adding a multi-lingual capability to our platforms so that it displays in German, French, and Spanish to start. We will also be expanding our membership. It's actually already diversifying so early next year we have Luven University Press joining the OBC along with two other university presses which is really exciting. Lastly we are running a workshop in South Africa in Cape Town in February which will bring together publishers from diverse Southern African context together to explore how the OBC can build capacity to enable them to become OBC members. You can find a full description and submission information by following the QR code on the slide so I really encourage you to submit. We would love to have you there. So that's it from me. I'm going to hand it back over to Lydia. Thank you so much. And to conclude when developing the Open Book Collective we consulted extensively with open access book publishers, infrastructure providers, librarians, scholarly communication librarians, open access experts across the European Union in US and internationally. We did it in a series of workshops during the last three years during the COPIM project and we believe that we created a community and that is highly unique and also singular in the current open access publishing landscape and is more than worthy of investments. The landscape of the open access monograph is still in flux but we believe is open for innovation by pioneering new community-owned open access business models including new funding and publishing models as well as new collaborative platform that is governed by and for the benefit of the community it serves. Platform that is currently very generously supported by the Arcadia and Research England Development Fund but that will be fully financially independent in three years from now. The Open Book Collective is charting a new collective path towards an open and sustainable monograph future. Presses, publishing initiatives and infrastructure providers can join the OBC based on adherence with the specific membership criteria. So thank you everyone for your attention and if you want to learn more please visit our website, our information hub, talk to us after this presentation or reach out to us by email or and also we'll be happy to answer any questions that you might have right now. Thank you. Hi I'd like to know more about how you're doing advocacy for the publishers that are part of the collective especially to authors so we do change where people are publishing. That's a really great question so we have a part of our part of the OBC is to conduct outreach on behalf of each publisher and so we've actually been trying to get in touch with more and more authors putting together information that they can use to advocate for OAA. We've put together a lot of panels at conferences and meetings like these where we actually invite authors and publishers to be a part of the community because they really do feel like they're actually overlooked. We use TOTE to identify the authors and their institutions and try to work with them to grow their knowledge about how OAA is on their campus. We visit a lot of universities and just are we make ourselves available to whatever to do whatever they need and we also as part of the information hub early next year will have sort of like a campaign and info sheet that authors can use. So we're you know we have a couple different strategies and I think that's a really good question. Thank you so much. Did you have anything to add Lydia? No I think it's good. Hi my name is Pascal Calarco I'm from University of Windsor in Canada and as a university library we use OMP and press books to publish faculty monographs. My question is if you could characterize the type of faculty who are interested in publishing this way we've found success in approaching senior scholars in the humanities who the rights have come back to them after publishing say a book with University of Toronto Press after 10 years they have the rights again and in some cases they're interested in doing a second edition of that work as kind of a capstone for their careers and so they don't really care about trying to establish themselves there's none of that concern about research impact and all that kind of thing it's it's more just finishing off their careers and I'm wondering if you could comment on that. Well it depends on context I think in the UK for instance the landscape is quite different so more people are familiar with open access many of the people working on the coping project actually were introduced to open access because they were graduating with a PhD and were required to publish to open access. As far as the US and Canada it looks a little differently just because of you know tenure and that recognition as you're speaking to I have done a lot of research on this and it's quite interesting I would say the majority of our authors are really at different stages in their career you know we just had a meeting with a university last week and I noticed that there were a lot of early graduate students that we had like those were the affiliations with the university that were publishing away so I can't say that I'm noticing a trend if they're either later career or earlier career but it is a consistent topic of concern in the US and Canada about will this be recognized. I have questions about this so you know we're happy to provide support I have actually a couple really great links to share with you where other people have done case studies looking at the impact of OA content for tenure and I'm sure Lydia can say something as to you know working at her university about what it's like working with scholars interested in publishing OA. Yes absolutely I think there is different strategy looking internationally at different national context as Levi said in Europe there is a lot of open access mandates and that's an important driver for the open access publishing in the US as we know and in Canada it's a different landscape however open book collective is still a very new initiative we are growing this is just the first year so we've been focusing on supporting open access infrastructure allowing presses to transition to open access basically their content when it comes to the advocacy at scale that's something that we will be working during the next few years as well. Hi Lisa Janaki Hinschliff at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign very interesting to see the developments and the investment that your funders are making in catalyzing these projects one of the things I'm hearing from a number of open access publishers particularly and when they have models that are membership models or subscribe to open or anything that's not a transactional kind of we pay you to publish is that increasingly libraries are asking for evidence of who is reading the content so that they know that the investment they're making in the particular open access book collective not just capital letters but generally is is sort of delivering for their own institution I know that some of your members punkdom for example have made pretty strong statements about how readers should not be surveilled and that kind of data so I'm wondering if you can talk about as a collective at this level where you're providing services to publishers but then asking also members like how you are managing that and if you are actually looking at this question of how you will provide evidence back to your members you know libraries that might join or whatever or to the publishers themselves like are they getting readers on this content and who are those readers so like kind of in a nutshell how are you surveilling readers right now and what do you anticipate the pressures are going to be on your platform to do so this is a really fantastic question thank you so much and I think this is all the open access publishers we've been thinking about that is that important issue how to collect the usage data and the OAB and OAPN they are currently working on the infrastructure in that area to provide data on open access ebooks globally including different institutional data in different country different languages at regional level so we are working on it I don't think that we have clear answer how to do it at the present moment right now but this is something that should be addressed in from my point of view as a community we should be working together with infrastructure providers as a whole to address this specific issue and Livia I don't know if you want to add yeah no I think this is a really great question of course you know we this has been something we've been grappling with because we have you know as librarians are starting to be approached by many different OA initiatives the question is yeah we need to support these but in the end the landscape is becoming very crowded so as librarians and institutions start to support OA they're going to start assessing them differently based on yeah local relevance usage statistics I do also work for punctum and we have only had two librarians actually ask us ever for usage statistics we gather them through JSTOR project to Muse we're also part of the OA book usage data trust project so we're always trying to figure out this idea of you know what is important with these usage statistics in addition to something like local relevance which is again why I also appreciated the author question because it's about looking at this very you know like we're looking at the full context and I'm really looking forward to the next couple years as we think more about usage data and what is going to be important to librarians and again this is why they're so essential to the open book collective because they will always be a part of the conversation and letting us know what they need in order to make this happen and we also want to think holistically about that question it's not only about the usage data but also publishing data institutional affiliation all of that is part of the data that some of that taught the open meta data management system that we've been developing will be able to provide as well other questions so we are at the time thank you everyone for joining us and please talk to us at the break or during the lunchtime if you have any additional questions thank you