This is a guest post by Lucy Barnes (Open Book Publishers/ScholarLed/COPIM), Tom Mosterd (DOAB/OAPEN) and Agata Morka (OPERAS/COPIM/SPARC EU), the coordinators of the Open Access Books Network.
The Open Access Books Network (OABN), begun by OAPEN, OPERAS, ScholarLed and SPARC Europe, is an open online community devoted to sharing knowledge and resources about all aspects of open access books.
Founded in September 2020, it is open to everyone interested in open access books. In recent months we have organised events, published blog posts and had lively discussions with members of the OA books community, as well as developing a crowd-sourced OA books calendar and a repository of publications related to OA books. We have an online group on Humanities Commons, a Twitter account, a YouTube channel and a Slack channel, all focused on OA books.
The OABN is completely free to join and we encourage anyone interested in (or working with) open access books to participate in our activities. We want to engage publishers of OA books (including small-scale and scholar-led presses as well as commercial and university publishers) from all over the world, but also researchers, librarians, students, and people developing infrastructure for open access books.
Voices from the OA Books Community
Many of you will be familiar with Plan S, developed by a group of funders in the form of cOAlition S, ‘to make full and immediate Open Access to research publications a reality’. By the end of 2021, coAlition S will issue a statement on how Plan S principles will apply to monographs and book chapters, together with related implementation guidance.
We are hosting a series of five open, free-to-attend workshops from March to May, called ‘Voices from the OA Books Community’, which will explore what a Plan S for books should look like. Each session will focus on a different policy area, including: scope, quality assurance and transparency; green OA for books; discoverability and metadata; and rights retention and licensing.
At these events, we are seeking to gather a broad range of perspectives from the OA book community through presentations and discussion. These discussions will then feed into a policy document that will be created by SPARC Europe, and presented to cOAlition S as they consider a Plan S for books.
If you miss a session, the recordings of the presentations and the notes from the discussions will be available via the OABN Humanities Commons group, and it will be possible to add additional feedback for two weeks after each event.
We urge you to find out more and sign up here to make sure your voice is heard.
Join the conversation
For anyone interested in learning more about the OABN, this interview highlights our activities on the Humanities Commons platform. You can find and join the Open Access Books Network on Humanities Commons. You can also follow us on Twitter and sign up for the OABN mailing list to receive updates, OA book news, invitations to future events and more.
We hope to see you there!
