Experimental Books: Re-imagining Scholarly Publishing is the final conference of COPIM’s Experimental Publishing and Reuse working group.
COPIM (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs) is a 3-year project led by Coventry University as part of an international partnership of researchers, universities, librarians, open access (OA) book publishers and infrastructure providers and is funded by The Research England Development Fund and Arcadia—a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. COPIM is building community-owned, open systems and infrastructures to enable OA book publishing to flourish, delivering significant improvements in the infrastructures used by OA book publishers and those publishers transitioning to OA. The project addresses the key technological, structural, and organisational hurdles—around funding, production, dissemination, discovery, reuse, and archiving—that are standing in the way of the wider adoption and impact of OA books. COPIM will realign OA book publishing away from competing commercial service providers to a more horizontal and cooperative knowledge-sharing approach.
COPIM’s Experimental Publishing and Reuse Work Package (WP 6) brings together publishers, technologists, researchers, and authors to devise strategies to promote experimental book publishing and the reuse of, and engagement with, open access books. We are examining ways to align existing open source software, tools, workflows and infrastructures for experimental publishing with the workflow of open access book publishers. To do so, we are co-developing a set of pilot experimental academic books together with the scholar-led presses Open Humanities Press, Mattering Press, and Open Book Publishers which are being developed with the aid of these open source tools and technologies. We are also publishing research reports and are developing online resources for authors and publishers interested in exploring experimental forms of publication.
