Keep it Open, Keep it Ours: The Importance of Community-Owned Infrastructure in Open Access Book Publishing
Location
Online
Start Date
21-10-2025 11:15 AM
End Date
21-10-2025 11:35 AM
Description
When research is under attack, it is tempting to retreat into familiar ways of working and publishing. Big organisations might seem to offer security, and paywalls might look like protection against surveillance and stifling oversight.
This is misguided. Paywalls create silos, dividing haves and have-nots. They also create gated points of access: the organisation that controls the gate controls the content. Open access (OA), by contrast, liberates content from post-publication censorship and suppression, whether by publisher or government, and equality of access creates opportunities for collective action. But openness alone is not sufficient: we need community support for open publication routes to create an information ecosystem that is robust against authoritarian threats.
I will present Open Book Publishers (https://www.openbookpublishers.com/), an academic-led, non-profit, independent OA book press, as a case study in resilient, community-led, open publishing systems for OA books. The two core components in its success are: a funding model that harnesses community support rather than state or individual-fee-based funding to pay for OA publication; and participation in community-owned, non-profit infrastructure, built by the Copim community (to which we belong) supporting our own publishing and that of others.
I will explain how collective funding makes it more difficult to critically threaten OBP financially, and how, by using open, community-owned infrastructure to fund, disseminate, and archive our OA books, we rely on infrastructure that the scholarly community collectively controls. I will conclude by arguing that open, interoperable infrastructures and robust community networks are the best way to safeguard the information ecosystem against control by large organizations, whether they be corporations or governments.
Keep it Open, Keep it Ours: The Importance of Community-Owned Infrastructure in Open Access Book Publishing
Online
When research is under attack, it is tempting to retreat into familiar ways of working and publishing. Big organisations might seem to offer security, and paywalls might look like protection against surveillance and stifling oversight.
This is misguided. Paywalls create silos, dividing haves and have-nots. They also create gated points of access: the organisation that controls the gate controls the content. Open access (OA), by contrast, liberates content from post-publication censorship and suppression, whether by publisher or government, and equality of access creates opportunities for collective action. But openness alone is not sufficient: we need community support for open publication routes to create an information ecosystem that is robust against authoritarian threats.
I will present Open Book Publishers (https://www.openbookpublishers.com/), an academic-led, non-profit, independent OA book press, as a case study in resilient, community-led, open publishing systems for OA books. The two core components in its success are: a funding model that harnesses community support rather than state or individual-fee-based funding to pay for OA publication; and participation in community-owned, non-profit infrastructure, built by the Copim community (to which we belong) supporting our own publishing and that of others.
I will explain how collective funding makes it more difficult to critically threaten OBP financially, and how, by using open, community-owned infrastructure to fund, disseminate, and archive our OA books, we rely on infrastructure that the scholarly community collectively controls. I will conclude by arguing that open, interoperable infrastructures and robust community networks are the best way to safeguard the information ecosystem against control by large organizations, whether they be corporations or governments.
