PKP’s Community Engagement and Outreach Associate Director, Urooj Nizami, interviews OBC’s Managing Director, Joe Deville, to explore OBC’s origins, purpose, and relationships, as well as OMP and the open book publishing landscape, among other fascinating stories.
Over the past year, Open Monograph Press (OMP), PKP’s book publishing software, has found itself riding a fresh wave of momentum. A big part of that energy comes from the Open Book Collective (OBC), whose support has helped spark new possibilities for the platform.
With OBC’s support, our OMP Coordinator, Zoe Wake Hyde, and the team have been able to think bigger and bolder about the future of OMP. On the horizon are improvements that get right to the heart of what makes a book a book: smarter chapter handling for richer metadata, smoother submission processes, and more intuitive workflows.
This collaboration offers more than just technical advancement, it’s about reshaping the open access book publishing landscape. Together with our communities, PKP and OBC are building the infrastructure, tools, and shared vision needed to reimagine what scholarly publishing can be when it’s open and built by the communities it serves.
Interview with Joe Deville, Managing Director of the Open Book Collective
- Could you share the origin story of the Open Book Collective? What inspired its creation?
Very happy to. Of course, with something like the Open Book Collective, there isn’t just one origin story, but many. However, my personal involvement in what became the Open Book Collective can be traced back to a series of conversations that were happening in the 2010s between some independent open access academic-led book publishers, which included my own publisher – Mattering Press – as well as publishers such as Open Book Publishers, punctum books, Meson Press and others. What we were engaged with was trying to think how we could collaborate together and to scope out what the major challenges were that we were collectively facing as small, or at least smaller, open access book publishers.
These conversations in due course led to an ultimately successful funding application to an organisation called OpenAIRE, to fund a project titled New Platforms for open access Book Distribution. We were extremely surprised that we were successful and very grateful of course. Over and above the specific project outputs, out of that project, came at least a key principle: that it was really vital for the future of open access book publishing that we invested deeply in collaboration over competition. We saw our competition as not each other, but the far larger range of commercial publishers in the ecosystem that were, in many ways, gobbling up many of the infrastructures and spaces for scholarly communication, including those for open access. We also started to think through what concrete solutions needed to be in place to address some of the challenges we identified. One of those was an idea for some kind of intermediary or platform that could scale the kind of diamond open access funding models that other publishers – Open Book Publishers and punctum books for example – had successfully developed.
These conversations, alongside others happening elsewhere – and here I have to credit colleagues like Janneke Adema who really drove this forward, building party on her work in establishing the Radical open access Collective, led in due course to an application, to the Research England Development Fund and Arcadia for the project that would become in due course COPIM, standing for Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs. This project included a specific area of work focused on developing the aforementioned intermediary.
Now we didn’t know what that intermediary would be and it took a long time to really work out how it’d work and how it would be governed, amongst other things. But fundamentally, it was rooted in the principle that it was vitally important to develop approaches that were collaborative rather than competitive. And I like to think that in many ways the Open Book Collective is a manifestation of that principle.
- How did your background in sociology and science and technology studies influence your engagement with open access publishing?
So partly the answer to that question lies in the origins of my own press, Mattering Press, that I was involved in co-founding. Mattering Press is a small scholar-led, open access book publisher, producing works in and around the field of science and technology studies. My colleagues and I set up that press because at that particular time, we noted that, while there existed a number of interesting open access journals, there was nothing really in our field for the publication of longform science and technology studies works. Based on little more than this insight, we set about – with little knowledge or understanding of publishing, let alone open access publishing – in establishing the press.
In retrospect, this seems hopelessly naive. But there are broader reasons why an engagement between sociology and science and technology studies and open access is important, some of which have only become clearer to me as I’ve worked in the field. And here it’s worth noting that, for me, the promise of open access is not an entirely straightforward one. In actual fact, my Mattering Press colleague Endre Danyi and I, in the very early days of the press, wrote about this in calling for a focus on ‘openings’ rather than openness as an unqualified ‘good’. We can see, for example, how the ways open access is sometimes talked about has overlaps with certain facets of libertarian politics.
For me, this is where both insights from both sociology and science and technology studies are important. From sociology, I have drawn an interest in the very real inequalities of scholarly publishing. From science and technology studies, I have become interested in thinking about the infrastructures of open access publishing. This field has looked at the specific role of infrastructures in a variety of contexts, including digital infrastructures, and the often underappreciated politics of those infrastructures.
During the COPIM project, I, in close collaboration with my colleague Eileen Joy from punctum books, sought to put some of these principles to work, recognising that whatever we produced – what would become the Open Book Collective – would inevitably be a political intervention. So, for example, we ensured that we really prioritised the support of groups of initiatives via the Open Book Collective rather than encouraging potentially supporting universities to pick and choose between different entities – the latter would be to create something more akin to a conventional marketplace, which we were keen to avoid. And we also saw that this is also reflected, I think, in the way the Open Book Collective is governed – but I will come back to this later.
- What do you see as the relationship between critical technology studies and the engaged practice of open publishing and what is the imperative to support open infrastructures in building the open access future so many of us envision?
So the answer to this question very much carries on from what I was just talking about, as another part of the context that was informing much of our thinking in the early days of what would become the COPIM project was the fact that so many of the infrastructures of scholarly communication were ending up in the hands of large, highly commercial organisations (I increasingly hesitate to call them ‘publishers’). For me, the kinds of open access I am keen to support focus not just on making scholarly communication open, but also on making the infrastructures of scholarly communication open – and partly this is to do with ensuring that they are open source, but there is more to it than simply that – and they are community-led and community governed. Too often, we’ve seen promising open access infrastructure initiatives emerge and then being bought up by large commercial organisations. I’ve talked about this in some of the talks that I’ve given recently, but obvious examples include the purchase of Knowledge Unlatched by Wiley and Ubiquity Press by DeGruyter Brill.
For us it’s really important to support open infrastructures that provide an alternative to these kinds of commercial infrastructures. And this includes infrastructures with protections in place to prevent these kinds of acquisitions from happening. That’s something that we’ve sought to do with the Open Book Collective’s detailed and robust governance structure and in our registration as a charity in the UK. And it’s something that we continually advocate for other open infrastructure providers to be doing.
- What is so distinctive about the book or monograph as a medium that drew OBC’s focus?
I’m a social scientist, working across the disciplines of sociology, science and technology studies and organisation studies. And within these disciplines, as in many disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities, the monograph or the book remains perhaps the most centrally important format. However, at the start of the work that I and my colleagues were involved with as part of the COPIM and its successor, Copim’s Open Book Futures project, it remains the case that there are far fewer options for publishing longform works open access, as there are for publishing shorter form, particularly journal articles, open access.
For me and other project colleagues, it is a format that needs to be protected. It’s a format that requires specific infrastructures. These include funding infrastructures, of course – and the Open Book Collective is only one such infrastructure – but also infrastructures that help with the production of books – OMP is of course a vital tool in this respect – and with management of metadata and book dissemination – Thoth Open Metadata and DOAB / OAPEN are excellent examples. And it’s a format that has a quite different temporality to the journal article, which makes the author / institution pays model – the Book Processing Charge, the longform version of the Article Processing Charge – arguably even more unsuited. We have argued that the book processing charge is fundamentally not fit for purpose when it comes to being a model for supporting open access book publishing.
- What core values and frameworks underpin OBC’s mission and vision?
I’ve already talked about how important supporting the longform texts is. So here I’ll just highlight a few other core values. One is a real commitment to bibliodiversity. We think it’s really important that the scholarly system as a whole has in place mechanisms to support different kinds of publishers, producing different kinds of texts, working in different kinds of languages, using different formats, amongst many other possible points of variation. Practically, we look to support this value through the kinds of publishers and infrastructure providers that we have as members, but also in other ways. For example, we will soon be launching our website as multilingual and are really focusing on bringing on board more non-English language presses, to join our first predominantly non-Anglo press, Verlag Barbara Budrich.
Another really important principle is what we call ‘scaling small’, which we counterpose to approaches that look to scale up. One of the achievements of the Open Book Collective, I think, is to begin to democratise the diamond open access funding model. Up until the existence of the Open Book Collective it simply wasn’t feasible or practicable for smaller initiatives – such as my own, Mattering Press, but also a number of other open access presses – to run their own, independent diamond open access programmes. What we do at the Open Book Collective is take on the work of hosting this kind of programme. This includes both administering them, including dealing with the resulting financial flows, and doing the outreach necessary to generate support for those programmes. This is no small task and to my mind embodies this principle of scaling small, in that it brings together members from a variety of different contexts into one space and provides a single offer to supporting universities, while sustaining each initiative individually.
- How does OBC see the future of open publishing, and what role does it hope to play in that landscape?
Here it’s worth highlighting that the Open Book Collective is a key partner on Copim’s second project, the Open Book Futures project, which I already mentioned. The project has this question – of the future of scholarly communication – very much at its heart.
I would very much agree with my other project colleagues that we see this future as one where we are having an increasingly resilient network of community-led open infrastructure providers, collaborating together with open access publishers to deliver a bibliodiverse and financially sustainable way of doing open access publishing, producing texts of the highest quality with field leading standards of metadata quality, with rigorous peer review (and that, to me, does not necessarily mean conventional, double blind peer review), which then flow freely and easily to a wide variety of different spaces (one of the huge advantages of open access texts of course, is their ability to move freely in scholarly space because of their open licence. And we know that open access texts, for example, are cited far more than their closed access equivalents). What is striking to me is how close we already are to seeing at least the key building blocks for delivering this future in place – I like to think the Open Book Collective is one such building block, but there are certainly others: PKP, obviously, and our project colleagues OAPEN / DOAB and Thoth Open Metadata, but also emerging initiatives like the Open Journals Collective.
- In your view, how does OMP address a gap or meet a need in the open book publishing landscape?
I’ve really witnessed first hand the potential that OMP has, particularly in my recent engagements with colleagues in Africa. I’ve worked particularly closely with colleagues at the University of Cape Town and the African Platform for Open Scholarship, and I’ve seen that amongst its members, OMP is offering them an absolutely vital route for sustaining themselves, in many cases, as a librarian-led open access book publisher. I have seen the ways that OMP makes it far, far easier for them to manage their workflows and then potentially also to get the books into those dissemination channels. This, for me, really demonstrates the potential of open, freely available, robust open infrastructures for scholarly communication.
- Which communities and networks does OBC most actively engage with?
I suppose that one of the features of our work is that we are routinely engaging with different sides of the publishing ecosystem. So obviously we are engaging with publishers and infrastructure providers – talking to them about how we work, what our membership criteria are, exploring whether they could benefit from collaborating with the Open Book Collective, and so on. And then of course we are engaging with libraries and sometimes their representatives, particularly library consortia – similarly, exploring opportunities for collaboration and explaining our model and our values.
Much of this work happens in a broadly Global North context. But as I’ve alluded to already, we also engage much more broadly. One of the particular features of the Open Book Collective is our annual small grants programme – the Collective Development Fund – that publishers and networks interested in expanding their open access book publishing work can apply to. We have a requirement that at least 30% of funds awarded should go to projects that benefit lower and middle income networks or initiatives. In our first round of funding in 2024, we comfortably exceeded that threshold and we expect to do so again in our current second round, the recipients of which will be announced later this year.
So in this respect, our terrain is, I suppose, global. And it is also multilingual. We released our recent Collective Development Fund calls in not just English but also French, Portuguese and Spanish. And we also have recently increased the multilingualism of our team. We were really pleased to take on board a new colleague recently: Arturo Garduño-Magaña, who has joined as our Metadata Management Associate. As part of this work, he is really spearheading our engagement in Latin American and Spanish language contexts, which is something I am really excited to follow in the coming months.
Of course, there is still a lot more work to do. The Open Book Collective remains relatively new and is still unknown in many quarters of the scholarly landscape. This is why I’m very grateful for these kinds of opportunities to talk about our work.
- In your time with OBC, what has most surprised you?
I’ll be quite honest here, I think what surprised me the most is that the model works. Of course, I hoped and believed that it could. But at the start of our work, I genuinely did not know whether any universities would take what we are trying to do seriously. Our first subscription was from the University of Manchester and they decided to support what was then our entire package. I can’t express how happy we were to receive that first subscription – and from what is a highly respected university in a UK context. It was a real moment of validation of some of the arguments that we have been putting forward for some time.
Now we are in a position where we have raised over £1million [circa $1.35million / CAD$ 1.85million / €1.15million] in commitments for our publisher and infrastructure provider members, which continues to astonish me when I see it written down. However, it is a little bit misleading: there is still a huge amount of work still to be done, both to fully secure our own future, without recourse to external grant funding, and to further support our members. But I think what we have shown is more than just a proof of concept: models like the Open Book Collective really can succeed in being transformative of the conditions of scholarly communication.
- How can institutions best support OBC and, in turn, the publishers and infrastructure it so effectively helps sustain?
As I’ve mentioned, a key part of our advocacy is directly to academic libraries and we hugely welcome the support that libraries and consortia are able to provide to us. This in many ways, of course, is the bottom line. But there are a far wider range of ways that library colleagues can support us if their university or their colleagues are not yet in a position to be able to sign off on this support. This can include simply inviting us to engage with your colleagues, to allow us to answer their questions and to enable us to present the work we are doing and the rationale behind it. It could also include engaging with the various calls that we make for collaboration – for example, to support the reviewing of Collective Development Fund applications – or our webinars and workshops.
But even more broadly than that, colleagues in various parts of the scholarly ecosystem can support us just by being open to thinking about what scholarly publishing is and how it should be funded. In the pitches we make to universities we of course do make clear how we are directly relevant to them, to their staff, and to their library strategies. But we also make clear that supporting the Open Book Collective and our publisher and service provider members is about more than just that: it is also about the urgent need to support the wider global open access ecosystem. So I think having and helping foster an openness to those kinds of arguments and to thinking of scholarly publishing not in terms of a service relationship but a space for genuine, mutual collaboration. So yes, please do come to us with an open mind. This is perhaps most important of all, in the final analysis.
Thank you, Joe, for this very insightful and thought provoking interview. You’ve really painted a picture of OBC, the collaborative nature, the impacts of infrastructure on knowledge sharing, and the importance of supporting that infrastructure, as well as some fascinating stories.
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Our relationship with OBC has given us the chance to take a fresh, thoughtful look at OMP. It’s encouraged us to think more deeply about accessibility and usability, and has opened up a more direct, meaningful connection with the community we serve. We’re truly grateful to OBC for the insight, collaboration, and care you’ve brought to this work. Looking ahead, we’re excited to continue building on this momentum, together, toward more inclusive, distributed, responsive, and community driven publishing tools.
Open Book Collective releases testimonial video
Watch “Open Book Collective in action: Hear from our community: “We are excited to share a new testimonial video about building a fairer and more sustainable future for scholarly books featuring Joe Deville (Mattering Press Trustee & OBC Managing Director), Janneke Adema (Associate Professor in Digital Media, Coventry University), Juan Pablo Alperin (Scientific Director, Public Knowledge Project), Kaitlin Thaney (Executive Director, Invest in Open Infrastructure), Josiline Phiri Chigwada (University Librarian, Chinhoyi University of Technology), and Francois van Schalkwyk (Managing Trustee, African Minds). Filmed at the 2nd Global Summit on Diamond Open Access at the University of Cape Town, December 2024.”
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