

We are aiming to pilot the platform in Spring 2022 We will naturally expect a commitment to sustainable OA monograph publishing and broad agreement with our values of co-operation, anti-commercialism, anti-competition, transparency and sharing. Our focus is on small-to-medium sized presses who are interested in networking with and mutually supporting other like-minded publishers, accommodating a range of business models but assisting publishers in moving away from Book Processing Charges. We are currently in the process of defining the criteria according to which publishers may join the membership platform.

The OBC is intended to be self-sustaining beyond the conclusion of COPIM. The OBC is an output arising from the COPIM project, but is a separate legal entity in the form of a UK-registered charity. What is the relationship of the OBC to COPIM? We are working together across the landscape of the Open Knowledge Commons to enable a more sustainable future for open access (OA) book-length and long-form scholarship. The Open Book Collective is a group of publishers, publishing service providers, and research libraries. The revenue platform is designed with flexible modularity, portability, and customizability as its chief features, ensuring that both emerging, smaller-scale and established, larger-scale publishers seeking to transition to open access and in need of durable, flexible business models for doing so, can benefit from it. WP2 is creating the technical infrastructures, organizational processes (together with WP4), financial management procedures, and legal standards to enable these new funding channels to be sustainable long term. Scaling small allows publishers to benefit from mutual support and knowledge sharing without being forced to scale upwards in terms of production. The platform emphasizes open source software, community-owned and led open access, and enables a range of publishers to work together, either as individuals or consortiums, via a networking model we call ‘scaling-small’.

The platform offers a range of flexible subscription models for subscribers to support OA book, and supports publishers in distributing their output, networking, and moving away from dependence on Book Processing Charges. This is a modular, scale-able revenue generation and management platform for open access books, available to publishers, libraries and other users. The OBC will launch and support the Open Book Collective online platform. WP2 is founding the Open Book Collective: a UK-registered charity comprised of OA book publishers, librarians and infrastructure providers.
