Research England Awards £2.2m to Project to Improve and Increase Open Access Publishing

UPDATED POST June 27 UC Santa Barbara Library is a Key Partner in $3.6 Million International Project to Envision a New Ecosystem For Open Access Publishing

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From Research England:

A new Research England funded project is set to help universities, researchers, libraries and publishers to make more, and better, use of open access book publishing. It will enable greater access to world-leading research and increase its impact.

Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) is a partnership led by Coventry University and also consisting of:

Birkbeck, University of London, Lancaster University and Trinity College, Cambridge

The ScholarLed consortium of established open access presses (Open Book Publishers, punctum books, Open Humanities Press, Mattering Press, and meson press)

University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) Library and Loughborough University Library

Infrastructure providers the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and Jisc, and international membership organisation The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC)

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Research England has awarded £2.2 million [$2.78/ million USD]  to COPIM from the Research England Development (RED) Fund, which supports innovation in research and knowledge exchange in higher education that offers significant public benefits.

COPIM will transform open access book publishing by  moving away from a model of competing commercial operations to a more horizontal and cooperative, knowledge-sharing approach. This will involve:

Improving and innovating in the infrastructures (business models, preservation structures, and governance procedures) being used by open access book publishers and by those publishers making a transition to open access books

Enabling more productive collaborations between librarians, publishers, researchers and others involved in the open access landscape

Expanding opportunities by creating open source toolkits to develop the skills necessary to run open access publishing operations.”

Direct to Complete Project Announcement

Filed under: Academic Libraries, Awards, Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Digital Preservation, Libraries, News, Open Access, Preservation, Publishing