A place to discuss Open Access books
Last week, around 20 people from a number of presses[1] gathered online to meet one another and discuss key areas of interest for small university presses publishing Open Access books—particularly those areas in which collaborative problem-solving, information-sharing, collective action or mutual support might be valuable.
We identified the following in particular: Continue reading “Open café for small university presses: an update”
By Jeroen Sondervan, Utrecht University Library
In this post, Jeroen Sondervan reflects on the OA Workouts: Scholars at Work series he hosted for the Open Access Books Network, discussing what we learned and what others might draw from these examples of open scholarship. If you are interested in hosting a series yourself, or if you have ideas about what you’d like to see covered in future events, email info@oabooksnetwork.org.
— Continue reading ““Just doing it”: Five Talks on Digital Scholarship and Open Book Publishing”
This year at the OABN, among other topics we want to focus on the challenges that small university presses face when publishing OA books — either in addition to a closed-access list, or as an entirely OA press.
The issues faced by smaller university presses when publishing OA are often different to the big publishers, and more akin to those tackled by small academic-led presses such as those that form the ScholarLed collective. The OABN coordinators (Agata, Lucy and Tom) are interested in finding out whether the OABN could be a useful forum for smaller university presses to gather and share knowledge and best practices, devise solutions to common issues, and ask for information or advice from the broader OABN community on any subject related to OA books. With this in mind, we are holding an Open Cafe on Thursday 27th January at 3pm GMT (details below).
Continue reading “Small university presses and OA books: come and join us!”
The OABN was officially launched in September last year, so 2021 marked both our first full calendar year and the beginning of our second twelve months of activities. It’s been a year of spreading our wings, holding increasingly ambitious events and welcoming many more members to the OABN: here we offer a quick rundown of the year’s highlights. Continue reading “Making new connections: year two of the OABN”
By Sharla Lair (Senior Strategist of Open Access and Scholarly Communication Initiatives, LYRASIS)
The library community is looking for new ways to use the funds they steward to open more scholarly content. There are fairly established strategies for funding open access (OA) journals, but many librarians have been asking:
What are the opportunities to direct funds to make scholarly books OA? And how do libraries evaluate these programs to determine whether library funds should be used to support them? Continue reading “Open Access Book Programs: Answering Libraries’ Questions”
UPDATE AUGUST 2021: a blog post reflecting upon the outcomes of the Voices from the OA Books Community series is available to view here, and you can download the document that summarises the discussions here. This summary was shared with cOAlition S.
What should a Plan S for books look like? This is a question we’ve been thinking about at the Open Access Books Network (OABN) — and we want to hear from as many members of the OA books community as possible as we seek to answer it.
Continue reading “A Plan S for books: Voices from the Community”
By Jayne Kelly (Ebooks Administrator, Collections and Academic Liaison Department, Cambridge University Library) and Clara Panozzo (Latin American & Iberian Collections, Collections and Academic Liaison Department, Cambridge University Library)
During the COVID-19 pandemic, two colleagues from different areas within the Collections and Academic Liaison department at Cambridge University Library have tackled problems related to Open Access books’ metadata and accessibility. Here you will read about the particular case that sparked their conversations, and the challenges that librarians encounter when dealing with Open Access books.
In spring 2020, lockdown began and our focus turned to electronic publications, so that we could still guarantee our readers access to relevant resources during this period. It became apparent to the Latin American and Iberian Collections team at Cambridge University Library that work had to be done on the bibliographic records pertaining to publications by CLACSO (Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, a network of 700 research institutions from 52 countries with a rich Open Access ebooks catalogue). CLACSO is an excellent publisher and it is essential for us that their publications are available for our readers. Continue reading “Open Access books and [in]discoverability: a library perspective”
This post, written by Jeff Pooley (professor of media & communication at Muhlenberg College and director of mediastudies.press), is an introduction to the next event in the ‘BoOkmArks: Open Conversations About OA Books’ series. A live session, open to all, will be held via this Zoom link on Tuesday 26th January at 16:00 CET/ 15:00 GMT/10:00 ET, when we will interview Jeff about the founding and first year of mediastudies.press. If you have questions for Jeff, please add them to the comments section below so they can be included in the conversation on 26th January — and join us at the event if you can! A recording will be available afterwards via our YouTube channel.
by Jeff Pooley
I’m looking forward to joining the BoOkmArks conversation next week. In advance of the discussion, I thought I would introduce the main project that I’ll be talking about, mediastudies.press. Continue reading “mediastudies.press: A conversation with founder Jeff Pooley”
The author of this post, Demmy Verbeke (Head of KU Leuven Libraries Artes), also spoke with us about the KU Leuven Fair OA Fund at a ‘BoOkmArks: Open Conversations About OA Books’ event. A recording of our conversation is available here.
by Demmy Verbeke
If you want change, try something new.
This seems comically simple advice, but it is advice that universities, worldwide, seem unable or unwilling to follow when it comes to building and maintaining the infrastructure for scholarly communication. The first reason to want change is the cost of this infrastructure, which has been considered problematic since the beginning of the twentieth century, and which has only risen since, high above the rate of inflation.
Secondly, concerns have been raised over and over again about how research output (and particularly how an individual scholar or an institution making use of scholarly communication infrastructure) has become intertwined with research assessment, and that the methods used for this assessment do not align with scholarly values. One example: assessing an individual scholar by the press where he or she publishes, which, in essence, equals outsourcing judgment to an external party who is not focused on assessing the quality of the work but its commercial potential. Continue reading “Financing change: KU Leuven’s Fair OA Fund”
This post is part of the BoOkmArks: Open Conversations About OA Books series. A live session will be held via this Zoom link on October 20th at 10:00 EDT / 15:00 BST / 16:00 CEST, when we will interview 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) about the Open Access Tracking Project discussed in this post. If you have any comments or questions for Peter and Milica, please add them to the comments section below so they can be included in the conversation on October 20th — and join us at the event if you can!
This event has now taken place — you can watch the recording here.
Co-written by Peter Suber, Milica Ševkušić, Tom Mosterd and Lucy Barnes
The Open Access Tracking Project (OATP), initiated by Peter Suber in 2009, is a crowd-sourced social-tagging project that runs on open-source software. It captures news and comment on open access (OA) to research in every academic field and region of the world. Continue reading “What is the Open Access Tracking Project (OATP)?”