As international funders make welcome moves towards OA publishing models, it is crucial to ensure the benefits and opportunies remain equitable, communal and accesible to the broad academic community. The Open Book Collective is currently registering as UK charity with the aim to address these issues and our online platform is scheduled to launch in summer 2022. This talk will describe our work and its importance in the current OA landscape.
The OBC will host an infrastructure and revenue management platform for the support, access, distribution and promotion of OA academic books.
We have developed the OBC and platform in consultation with librarians, publishers, and researchers, via a series of interactive workshops and reflective sessions.It will enable stakeholders explore, discover, access and support OA books from a range of leading publishers and infrastructure providers via high-quality integrated metadata and a fully searchable catalogue. In a bid to think beyond the Book Processing Charges that can sustain inequity in academic publishing, we offer a choice of flexible subscription packages, through which patrons can choose to support individual publishers and schemes, or indeed the entire collective. Whilst our major stakeholders are be librarians and publishers, the catalogue and metadata functions will be freely available to everyone. We also provide space for OA publishers to display their current and forthcoming books. Our mission is to build and maintain a sustainable infrastructure to support the publication, discovery and distribution of OA books via a range of flexible subscription packages, and make it easy for OA books to be delivered to libraries. The platform assists librarians in easily assessing OA content for local and global relevance, and comparing the offerings from different publishers in one place. The OBC is guaranteed to remain not-for-profit and anti-monopoly.
By attending this session, attendees will be able to:- Understand the position of the OBC and the broader need for OA book publishing to remain non-commercial
- Understand the problems with the potential monopolization and commercialisation of the OA landscape
- Compare more equitable options for both funding and purchasing OA books
