This page contains information about our events, including our boOkmArks series, our forthcoming talks and an archive of all our past events on our YouTube channel. All our events are free and open to anyone with an interest in open access books.

Sign up to hear about forthcoming events via our Mailing List.

Forthcoming events

All OABN events are free and open to anyone with an interest in open access books. Sign up to our mailing list for announcements and reminders about forthcoming events, and to receive the recordings afterwards.

Monday 12 June, 3pm BST / 4pm CEST / 10am EDT: a 90-minute PALOMERA Series engagement session with Infrastructure Providers. Meet online with the PALOMERA project team and discuss the opportunities and challenges that OA book funder policies present for your work. Sign up here!

Thursday 22 June, 4pm BST / 5pm CEST / 11am EDT: Towards Meaningful Engagement with Indigenous Knowledge: Authorship, Ownership, and Other Challenges. Sign up here!

Making research open is often assumed to be an unambiguous good. But what are some of the challenges of publishing Indigenous knowledge in an open access format? How can Indigenous community contributions be meaningfully acknowledged as authorship in metadata and copyright, and what are the ethics involved in making certain types of knowledge freely shareable and reusable? This conversation with Bendi Tso and Mark Turin explores some of the ways in which open access is embedded in systems of knowledge production and dissemination that do not always work within Indigenous contexts, and risk imposing upon them expectations and norms that do not reflect or serve the needs of communities.

Bendi Tso is a Tibetan scholar and a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests include oral tradition documentation, Indigenous knowledge mobilization, community-based research, and linguistic and cultural identities on the Sino-Tibetan Borderland. She has collaborated with members of her community as one of the co-authors of a forthcoming book entitled Shépa: The Tibetan Oral Tradition in Choné.

Mark Turin is an anthropologist and linguist, and an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia. Mark writes and teaches on language reclamation, revitalization, documentation and conservation; language mapping, policies, politics and language rights; orality, archives, digital tools and technology. Indigenous methodologies and decolonial practice inform and shape his teaching and research. Mark directs both the World Oral Literature Project, an urgent global initiative to document and make accessible endangered oral literatures before they disappear without record, and the Digital Himalaya Project, a platform to make multi-media resources from the Himalayan region widely available online. Mark is the author or co-author of four books, the editor of 12 volumes, and edits an open access series on oral literature.

Event archive

A 90-minute PALOMERA Series engagement session with Librarians. Attendees met online with the PALOMERA project team and discussed the opportunities and challenges that OA book funder policies present for their work. This event was not recorded. (17 May 2023)

A 90-minute PALOMERA Series engagement session with Publishers. Attendees met online with the PALOMERA project team and discussed the opportunities and challenges that OA book funder policies present for their work. This event was not recorded. (16 May 2023)

Joe Deville and Judith Fathallah (both from Lancaster University) talk about the Open Book Collective, what it is, who is running it and what it aims to do (6 April 2023)  Event recording

Niels Stern (OAPEN/DOAB) and Ursula Rabar (OPERAS/OAeBU) present the PALOMERA Series launch event, exploring the PALOMERA project and how you can engage with its work via the OABN’s PALOMERA Series (28 March 2023)  • Blog post  Event recording

Eric Hellman (Co-Founder and President of the Free Ebook Foundation) speaks about ‘Lessons from Project Gutenberg: OG OA’: his work with Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders, and how these experiences have informed his perspectives on the early days of open access and more recent developments in OA books (17th November 2022)  • Blog post  Event recording

Christina Drummond (Executive Director of the OA eBook Usage Data Trust) and Lucy Montgomery (Professor of Knowledge Innovation at Curtin University and co-lead of the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative) discuss the OAeBU Usage Data Trust project and the new developments its work will take over the coming years, in ‘Open Access Usage Data: Present Knowledge, Future Developments’ (9 November 2022)  Event recording  • Slides

A panel of speakers including David Collings (Bowdoin College), Eszter Kovacs (University College London), Lucy Barnes (Open Book Publishers) and Melissa Hagemann (Senior Program Officer at Open Society Foundations and Steering Committee member for the Open Climate Campaign) discuss ‘Lowering the Barriers to Climate Research: Climate Change and OA Books’ (25 October 2022)  Event recording

Charles Watkinson (University of Michigan Press), Demmy Verbeke (KU Leuven Libraries) and Lucy Barnes (COPIM, Open Book Publishers) share their unique experiences on how to make Open Access book publishing work in an equitable and sustainable way. Chaired by Tom Mosterd (Open Access Books Network) as part of the Liverpool John Moores University Open Research Week. (16 February 2022)    Event recording

Between October 2021 – January 2022 Jeroen Sondervan ran a series called OA Books Workouts: Scholars At Work This series features different scholars talking about publishing Open Access books. Hear more about their projects, why they chose Open Access, and the challenges and triumphs they experienced along the way!

Whitney Trettien discussed her work on Cut/Copy/Paste with Jeroen Sondervan as part of the OA Books Workouts: Scholars At Work series (11 January 2022)    Event recording

Jeff Pooley and Jeroen Sondervan discuss his Social Media & The Self: An Open Reader project as part of the OA Books Workouts: Scholars At Work series (14 December, 2021)    Event recording

Miklos Kiss, discussed his Film Studies in Motion project with Jeroen Sondervan as part of the OA Books Workouts: Scholars At Work series (30 November 2021)    Interview Event recording

Lucy Montgomery, discussed her work on Open Knowledge Institutions as part of the OA Books Workouts: Scholars At Work series hosted by Jeroen Sondervan. (9 November 2021)    Interview Event recording

Janneke Adema, discussed her Living Books project as part of the OA Books Workouts: Scholars At Work series hosted by Jeroen Sondervan. (19 October 2021)   Interview Event recording

Janneke Adema, Marcell Mars and Tobias Steiner of the COPIM Project discussed their work on developing infrastructure to support Experimental OA Book Publishing (29 June 2021)   Blog post   Event recording

Between March – May 2021 we ran a series called Voices from the Community, five free, open events covering policy developments for Open Access books. Recordings and notes from all these sessions can be found here.

Voices from the Community Session 1: Introduction to the Series & Scope (lead: Agata Morka)

Voices from the Community Session 2: Quality assurance and transparency (lead: Jeroen Sondervan)

Voices from the Community Session 3: Green OA for books (lead: Niels Stern)

Voices from the Community Session 4: Discoverability and metadata (lead: Rupert Gatti)

Voices from the Community Session 5: Rights retention and licensing (lead: Vanessa Proudman)

Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra (Open Science Officer at DARIAH-EU) discusses a new DARIAH bursary for OA monographs for ECRs in Digital Humanities. (23 March 2021)   Blog post  Event recording

Reggie Raju (Director Research and Learning Services) & Jill Claassen (Scholarly Communications & Research) both from the University of Cape Town Libraries discuss a new continental platform for Open Access books and journals in Africa. (02 March 2021)   Blog post  Event recording

Jeff Pooley (professor of media & communication at Muhlenberg College and director of mediastudies.press) discusses the founding and first year of mediastudies.press, a scholar-led Open Access book publisher. (26 January 2021)  Blog post  Event recording

Demmy Verbeke (Head of Artes, KU Leuven Libraries) discusses the KU Leuven Fund for Fair Open Access. (8 December 2020)  Blog post Event recording

Martin Eve (Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London) discusses his recently published (and Open Access) edited collection, Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access. (23 November 2020)  Blog post Event recording

Pierre Mounier (Associate Director of Open Edition and Coordinator of OPERAS) discusses the OPERAS-P project. (10 November 2020)  Blog post Event recording

Peter Suber (Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication and the the Harvard Open Access Project, and Senior Researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society), Milica Ševkušić (Librarian at the Institute of Technical Sciences of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade, Serbia; Member of the Repository Development Team at the University of Belgrade Computer Centre; and EIFL Open Access Country Coordinator in Serbia) and Gary Price (librarian, writer and consultant) discuss the Open Access Tracking Project (OATP). (20 October 2020)   Blog post   Event recording

Ros Pyne (Director of Open Access Books and Book Policies, Springer Nature) and Cameron Neylon (Professor of Research Communications at the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University and researcher at Collaborative Open Access Research and Development) discuss their recent white paper about Open Access book usage (6 October 2020)  Blog post Event recording

Eelco Ferwerda (Director, OAPEN) discusses the Open Access Books Toolkit (1 October 2020)   Blog post   Event recording

If you’d like to propose a topic for a boOkmArks event (including in a language other than English) please email us at info@oabooksnetwork.org or drop a comment in this thread.

CC BY 4.0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.