Open Book Futures InfoHub Report, September 2024

From the Executive Summary

Work Packages 2 and 3 of the Open Book Futures (OBF) project focus on exploring and supporting sustainable open access (OA) books publishing.1 A key deliverable of the OBF project is the establishment of a knowledge base to provide comprehensive resources on alternative funding models and modes of publishing, acquiring and archiving open access books, alongside new training and guidance on archiving and preservation best practice (hereafter referred to as the InfoHub). The InfoHub will (a) develop resources for stakeholders, (b) consolidate existing resources, (c) promote business models best practice, and (d) showcase project work on metadata, experimental publishing and archiving. By providing a comprehensive tool suite of resources we will accelerate outreach to libraries, publishers, academics and the wider public, to advocate for, advise on and encourage open access publishing and initiatives.Drawing on a variety of sources produced within and outside the OBF project, this scoping report presents an overview of existing resources and guidance for OA book publishing, a gap analysis, and our initial recommendations for the OBF working group (WG) to consider, all of which will be used to scope the direction and final format of the InfoHub.

During our research, we discovered that a great many resources, guidelines, and toolkits have been developed in the past few years, many of which are regularly maintained and updated, and that many others are currently under development. A few gaps were identified, most of which were outside of our expertise.

As a result, our preliminary conclusion is two-fold. Firstly, we believe that, given the wealth of high-quality resources already available, some of which are already outputs of this project, one valuable activity is in collating these, and categorising them, providing a central sign-posting location for external resources. Our aim is to complement rather than re-develop. Secondly, one of the lacunae which was well within the competencies of the participating project members was a resource on transitioning publishers from closed to open access, and we therefore propose that that will be one of other main purposes of this InfoHub.2

OA is now a fixture in the book publishing space; we need to make sure that as it grows further (which it will!), it is well-resourced and that reliable resources for all stakeholders groups are available and well sign-posted. OBF concluded that some further elaboration on some topics (by us) was necessary within our own remit.

The full text of the report is available to all.