What is a conference for? It can be to impart information; it can be to bring people with similar interests and concerns together; but perhaps the most valuable thing a conference can do is achieve a collective action, or at least a change of attitude.
The 2026 Copim Conference certainly achieved the first two of these goals. Many of the attendees were from newly established university presses, hoping to find out how the publishing process worked, and there was an abundance of information exchange. But collective action? That is more difficult to achieve. The paradox of a conference is that there needs to be some disagreement for the event to be valuable. Meetings of believers (and there is an evangelical angle to proponents of Open Access books) tend to become complacent if they consist of nothing more than reinforcing the consensus that, one presumes, attracted the attendees to the event in the first place. Everyone in the room knew the desired end point, which is more OA books, but I don’t know if we came away from the conference with a clear idea of how to get there.
This event, the first of its kind, was an attempt to summarize publicly the funded projects by the Copim Project, on OA books (the projects were funded by Research England and the Arcadia Foundation). With around 150 in-person attendees, and up to 100 joining online, it was clear there is a significant interest in this aspect of scholarly publishing. OA books have never received as much attention as OA articles, and diamond OA, by which the book is free to publish and free to access, is only a small proportion of OA book publishing currently, but there is no question that, particularly for the humanities, the desire to publish scholarly monographs remains fundamental for most researchers.
Disagreement does not need to be a slanging match, but there has to be a debate. Rupert Gatti, in his closing address, gave a stirring talk suggesting that there is a need for a moment of crisis to make Open Access books become a larger part of the scholarly lifecycle.
What did we learn? Something about the sociology of science, perhaps. The conference title chose to describe diamond OA “community-led” books. This is to distinguish these OA books from the use of book-processing charges, which, although probably the most common method of publishing OA, is not seen as really changing the way science works.
Noticeable too were several staff from institutional libraries (Aberdeen, Southampton, Sussex, London) who had set up or who were in the process of setting up a University Press, with the goal of providing publication opportunities for staff from the institution where the publisher was based.
The conference had a quasi-religious element to it, since all the participants desire a state of affairs that does not exist at present. Although the participants largely agree on the desired state, a world where libraries fund the freely available book output of the institution’s researchers, there is no consensus on how that desired state is to be achieved. There are various ways of envisaging how the change is to take place. You can look at other countries, and, very much to the event’s credit, there were participants from SciELO in Brazil, and from a consortium of Mexican universities. Not mentioned, but perhaps implied, was the way that some of the university presses were presumably making use of the knowledge they have gained by setting up diamond OA journals, to create a sustainable publishing process for OA books.
Standardising metadata
One way to get a process established is to provide effective metadata tools, and the impending release of Thoth (pronounced, perhaps unfortunately, as the German word for “death”) seems to have covered most bases. It sounded like everything you could want to standardize the process of describing, disseminating, and creating metrics for usage of OA books. The development team stated it had taken five years to get this far, and I wasn’t surprised. The software will be available in both free and paid versions, with additional functionality for the paid options. This was exciting news, and I only have two caveats. Firstly, what was presented as Thoth version 1.0, does not actually have a launch date, and some of the functionality, particularly the aggregated usage stats from several platforms, is ambitious. Secondly, for this process to be adopted, it should become a standard, at least a de facto one like Crossref. One attendee described the current state of OA book publishing as “a wild west”, and there is an urgent need for standard procedures in the way that Thoth can provide.
What the conference did not include
For me, there were three aspects of OA books that I felt could have been covered in more detail.
The obvious first point is that this was a conference aimed at changing the behaviour of a group of stakeholders, researchers, who were not present at the event. The academics themselves often see the issues in unexpected ways; for example, as Siddharth Soni pointed out, many academics do not want their research to be publicly available.
Secondly, there is the example of the remarkable rise of Open Educational Resources (OERs), which now have a whole infrastructure, with at least two repositories of OER information and resources in the United States. These works are diamond OA, and published in the face of, and to some extent in opposition to, the set texts of commercial publishers. How these work, how they are funded, are fascinating, and fundamental, questions.
Finally, and perhaps most important, there was little consideration of types of scholarly publishing apart from monographs. A couple of sessions were devoted to “radical” or “experimental” OA publications, but in practice these turned out to be rather disappointingly close to the early experiments in digital humanities several years ago, which too often comprised a small number of researchers in a labour-intensive publishing project with the aid of substantial external funding, a model that was never likely to be (nor intended to be) sustainable. I would have liked more discussion about which OA models are working well for journals, such as the CERN initiatives for publishing high-energy physics research (and which resulted in the creation of Zenodo, one of the most significant achievements of the OA movement). It would have been good to think about the publish, review, curate model for articles, or about how the process of scholarly research and publishing in the humanities can be captured more effectively than at present. Peer review for books, for example, is a very different process to peer review for articles: it is rare for a book to be rejected at the peer review stage. In contrast, perhaps, to the open peer review for some scientific articles, books in the humanities are typically reviewed and discussed openly, but after publication, in scholarly journals.
Paul Stevens of Bristol University Press described their experiment of “Rapid Responses”, short books of 20,000-40,000 words, which, he said, was set up during Covid, but which did not become widely adopted subsequently – I would like to know more about this initiative. Experiments of this kind are worth reflecting on; it seems to me that institutional publishing, if it is to become mainstream, should be offering some new angle on the publishing process that the established models do not currently provide. The big publishers are unwilling to experiment, but small publishers can, and should, try new ideas.
Ultimately, if OA books are to become mainstream, they need not just an external crisis, as Rupert Gatti, of Open Book Publishers, eloquently argued in his closing address, to force institutions and researchers to think differently, but a new business model, a new way of creating and sharing research and scholarly thinking.
openaccessfan
It’s great to see so much focus on community-led initiatives for open access publishing. The Copim conference sounds like a really interesting space to connect with others in the field.