If you follow PKP News, Community Forum, social media, or have attended recent sprints, you have likely learned about Zoe Wake Hyde’s Open Monograph Press (OMP) coordination and review efforts. While this interview does touch on the findings of Zoe’s work, it’s time to get to know Zoe and what drives all this fantastic work.
Welcome, Zoe! Can you tell us a bit about yourself?
Thank you! I am, first and foremost, a publishing nerd. I took a winding path in and out of academia to end up where I am today, with a decade of open publishing experience under my belt. My work and interests have always leaned towards the Humanities, which meant that open monographs were my first love in publishing, and over time, I’ve developed a deep commitment to knowledge justice.
To me, that’s the absolute raison d’etre for our work. Outside of work, I grew up in New Zealand, lived in France for a time, then hopped between Vancouver and Montreal in recent years. I also watch an enormous amount of sport, so I like to joke that I’m a book nerd and a jock all in one.
How did you learn about PKP, and what was it that attracted you to the role?
I first came across PKP as a student in SFU’s Master of Publishing program. Juan Pablo Alperin was one of my professors, and as I started learning about open access, it was a great example close to home. In the years since, I’ve appreciated PKP’s impact and leadership from afar and long hoped to have the chance to work here someday.
Then, last year, I was launching my own press and looking for contract work to complement it, and PKP was looking to invest more in OMP and its potential as a platform for open access book publishing. The stars aligned, and here we are!
Can you tell us more about your role as OMP Coordinator?
Absolutely. OMP has been around for a long time, and has been ticking over with improvements inherited from OJS development work, but it hasn’t really had a lot of attention given to it over the years. It’s my job to give it that attention.
That started with an internal review, speaking with the PKP team to learn from their experiences, and to understand what they saw as the missing pieces to make OMP more valuable to our community of users. I then interviewed those users, exploring the same questions, and gathered information around comparable products and the open book publishing landscape more broadly, so as to better situate OMP within it.
All of this information is now being channeled into a strategic plan and roadmap for OMP, which will be supported by funds coming from subscribers to the Open Book Collective and other funds we’re working to develop. OMP has its own value to contribute to PKP and our wider community, and my role to make sure that happens.
Tell us a bit about your recent findings on open monograph publishing.
One of the biggest findings is, in fact, that open monograph publishing is just one slice of a much bigger pie that includes many other kinds of materials. When looking closely at OMP catalogues, monographs stand alongside everything from edited volumes to textbooks to theses to reports, and much more.
The common trait across these materials is that they are non-serial, which makes them distinct from the serial content (i.e. journals) published via OJS. Recent conversations with OMP users have suggested that we refer to these as ‘standalone’ publications. So while many OMP users are using the platform to publish traditional scholarly books, many others are pushing the boundaries of what we consider to be scholarly publishing, which is one of the most exciting developments in open publishing in recent years.
There’s huge potential for PKP to foster more of this expansive approach to sharing knowledge. There’s much more I could share, but for now will point you to a recent presentation I gave at the Library Publishing Forum.
What does being an OMP Coordinator mean to you?
I love that I get to talk with OMP users, learn from them, and witness the incredible ways that they publish. Communicating our shared knowledge can be such a creative, fulfilling experience, and these folks are living it every day. The flipside of that is that I get to represent these people and the things that they value within the PKP organisation.
And the team is so eager to learn. There may have been a lack of information about OMP circulating internally in recent years, but the team’s enthusiasm for and commitment to open values mean they’re jumping at the chance to improve OMP and ensure its continued impact.
On a personal note, I also enjoy that the Coordinator role means that I can span many parts of the organisation. I have experience as a product manager, user researcher, community manager, and business development manager, and all of those skills come into play.
What are you most looking forward to building, changing, or learning during your time here?
My greatest measure of success will be how PKP continues to develop and support OMP and its user community beyond my tenure. The knowledge and experience I am helping to circulate needs to become embedded across the organisation.
It’s a challenge when there are competing priorities and resource constraints to consider, but PKP can and should be as much of a leader in the open book publishing space as it is in the open journal space. I also hope that my work leads to greater adoption of OMP by all kinds of institutions worldwide, enabling them to publish a greater diversity of materials in service of growing our collective knowledge.
What is your view of libraries as a source of scholarly publishing?
I’m a huge fan of library publishing. Libraries are such an interesting site of radical possibility within the fairly conservative institution of the university. In developing alternative paths to publication, outside those offered by commercial publishers, they’ve enabled more and better experiences of publishing to flourish.
At the same time, I’m a staunch advocate for publishing as a field and as an expertise that can exist outside of conventional publishing models. The way that bad-actor publishers like Elsevier and traditional/conservative publishers like many university presses operate is so often assumed to be the only way that publishing can be done, so many deem it all unsalvageable.
But publishing as an act, not an industry, can look wildly different from what those sorts of organisations do. Many of the strongest institutional publishing programs demonstrate this, as do independent and experimental presses, which are often found in the Humanities.
I’d love to see more of an embrace of the expertise that publishing practitioners (like me!) offer from library publishers, so that they don’t have to reinvent the wheel themselves, or burden existing library staff with even more work that they aren’t necessarily skilled in. Moving away from conventional publishing systems doesn’t mean they have to go it alone.
Why does open access monograph publishing matter to you?
As I’ve gestured to above, open publishing is fundamentally about knowledge justice. Where open access focuses on who can access and benefit from research and education, other publishing practices influence who can create, share, and be recognised for their knowledge.
All phases of knowledge creation and circulation must be made more equitable in order for us to pursue greater equity in our global knowledge ecosystems. Those are the stakes here. Within that collective pursuit, monographs, scholarly books, and more experimental, creative modes of communication matter to me because they represent a different way of expressing knowledge.
If we are to recognise and valorise many ways of knowing, then the formats in which we communicate matter. What’s more, these formats are most often associated with Humanities disciplines, which are vastly underrepresented in the open movement despite how vital they are to how we understand the world around us. Without them, the future we are working towards would be incomplete, and it would be a great loss to leave them behind.
Thank you, Zoe, for taking the time to share with communities your passion for publishing, what drives you, how communities are shaping the future of OMP, your thoughts on libraries as publishers, and more! Your work has undoubtedly already started moving OMP in much needed directions, and we look forward to what’s in store.
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If you’d like to learn more about OMP features and showcases, please visit our website. You can also get demos and test drives.
If it’s learning more about what’s happening with OMP, user cases, and Zoe’s work that you’re after, check out the following:
- PKP Releases OMP 3.5.0
- PKP Releases OMP 3.4.0
- What’s Next for OMP at AGM 2025 (recording at 28:29 on YouTube)
- OMP at Library Publishing Forum 2025
- OMP Review in Progress
- OMP Under the Spotlight (blog post)
- OMP Under the Spotlight (webinar recording)
- PKP Turin Sprint Notes: OMP
- OMP for Open Education
If you’d like to stay up to date with OMP progress and get invites to Community Calls to shape the future and sustainability of OMP, please sign up with Zoe!
