The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is investing in the future of open book publishing by undertaking a review of Open Monograph Press (OMP), led by myself, as PKP’s OMP Coordinator. I have long been an advocate for open book publishing, given the importance of books as a way to communicate knowledge, and their particular importance to Humanities disciplines. For just as long, I have admired PKP’s contributions to open publishing, so the chance to combine these interests is a special one.
As part of Open Book Futures (OBF), and with our recent move to join the Open Book Collective (OBC) Supporter Program, we are committed to ensuring that our path forward is grounded in the community’s needs and reflects the evolution of the open book ecosystem over the years since OMP launched in 2013.
OMP is an open source tool developed and maintained by PKP, developed for managing and publishing monographs, edited volumes, and scholarly editions. According to our Beacon data, it has been adopted by several hundred publishing operations since its inception, but we have not seen wide-scale uptake paralleling PKP’s most widely used publishing platform, Open Journal Systems (OJS).
This trend reflects the challenges PKP has faced as a small, but growing organisation, and is also influenced by the much slower adoption of open publishing models for books and other kinds of long-form scholarship across the scholarly landscape. While books are an important mode of research communication, with many different affordances than journals, they hold a unique cultural significance which brings unique challenges in transitioning towards an open model.
The potential impact, however, of open-first book publishing for improving knowledge equity globally is just as great as for journals, and interest and investment has grown over the past decade or more. As an organisation driven to make research a global public good, PKP is committed to doing its part. Other leaders like the Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project (from which OBF and OBC emerged) have advanced the conversation around open monograph infrastructures and catalysed community action, resulting in exciting momentum.
As such, now is the right moment for PKP to recommit to OMP and ensure we are responding to the shifting tides, including the embrace of the many significant long-form content types beyond the book. In this context, we are undertaking a deep exploration of OMP, its users, and its environs, in order to understand better how PKP should proceed, both strategically and operationally, in supporting OMP, and in pursuit of greater adoption of open publishing globally. We will share our findings with the broader PKP and open publishing communities, in order to contribute to the ongoing conversations taking place in the ecosystem.
Following in-depth interviews with several OMP users, we are seeking input from the wider community. If you are involved in publishing long-form scholarship, we invite you to contribute to the review by completing our forthcoming survey. Please stay tuned to PKP’s News Blog and social media channels for the call to participate.
We also invite you to join us on March 12th, 2025, for a town hall-style conversation where the initial review findings will be shared for discussion. You can learn more and register for the free online event via PKP’s News Blog. Registrants will receive the recording, and it will be shared with the public.
My thanks go to all who have and continue to support this work, I look forward to sharing the final report with you in April.
