Copim

Background: The Copim community combines work on funded research projects with wider forms of engagement aimed at building a fairer, more open future for scholarly books. It initially formed in 2019 around the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs [COPIM] project and expanded to include the Open Book Futures project in 2023. Ultimately, Copim shifted from being a project name to being the title of a virtual community that includes people and organizations from around the world collaborating on community-led and values-driven initiatives that support open access authors, publishers and readers.

Mission: Copim is working to build a fairer, more open future for scholarly books. Collectively, it is building a new set of infrastructures, work flows, practices and models to establish open access books more fully in the open access ecosystem.

Community over Commercialization:

“This notion of community is there in the very title of the first project, which was specifically about community-led infrastructures for monographs. From the very beginning, we were setting up our opposition to “business as usual” and to the dominance of the scholarly communication systems by large commercial players. We argue it’s not enough for just the content of scholarly work to be open — also, the infrastructures that carry, fund and disseminate that work also need to be open.”

“For Copim, community over commercialization means developing alternative ways of doing scholarly publishing where the mechanisms for publishing and disseminating scholarship are directly controlled by the communities that are served by that work. It also means communities of different kinds, including different geographical contexts, languages and priorities, having meaningful input into the work of these different parts of the scholarly system.”

“We have detailed governance structures for key parts of Copim’s work. For example, the Open Book Collective, for which I am the Managing Director, is resolutely member led. Our members are publishers, infrastructure providers, and libraries that support them. Those three caucuses each have statutory powers – for example around the appointments of our Trustees. They are far more than just an advisory group.”

“As we’ve recently talked about, it's also important that we collectively put pressure on what we mean by this term ‘community.’ Large commercial publishers could be understood as a community. But it doesn't necessarily mean that they are a community that we, at Copim, are actively working to nurture and support, given that we argue they are causing damage to some of the contexts that we work in. Sometimes ‘community’ becomes used in simplistic ways.”

“For us, the kind of communities that we’re interested in serving are the academic communities that are producing scholarly work and mission-driven open access publishers and infrastructure providers that are supporting the dissemination of the work in ways that maintain the input of those communities into the network.”

-Joe Deville, principal investigator, The Copim Open Book Futures project