Open Infrastructures for Open Access Books
Objective of the Working Group
The OPERAS Open Infrastructures for Open Access Books Working Group aims to foster collaboration among a diverse landscape of small and medium-sized community-focused, open infrastructure providers that deliver vital services to the open access (OA) book ecosystem. While these infrastructures are uniquely positioned to promote bibliodiversity and support local publishing cultures, their efforts have largely remained fragmented due to limited resources and coordination challenges. By nurturing stronger connections and joint solutions across these networks, the Working Group seeks to unlock their collective potential to advance not-for-profit OA book publishing across Europe and beyond. The initiative builds on insights from the COPIM and PALOMERA projects, identifying key areas where enhanced collaboration can drive meaningful progress.
A brief history
In the context of the Arcadia- and Research England-funded Copim Open Book Futures project (2023-26), we have, as part of a wider group, begun a dedicated mapping and outreach exercise to try to identify the manifold connections and relationships between those open, not-for-profit, community-owned infrastructures, with a particular focus on OA book publishing. This has been motivated by a shared curiosity to find out more about the manifold interconnections between the infrastructures themselves, while also considering the outward-facing links and connections to other digital infrastructure not-for-profits that—although not primarily engaged in book publishing—also provide key structural components and resources to the infrastructural ecosystem underpinning our digital publishing efforts. To list just a few examples, infrastructures such as Crossref (provision of DOIs) or Zenodo (generalist archiving of all kinds of digital content) come to mind.
From that starting point, more conversations took place that pointed to a wider need to facilitate collaborative exchange between these open, community-led stakeholders, to actively coordinate our individual efforts towards a more joined-up, collective and open response to the needs of OA book publishing.
This culminated in a workshop at the 2024 OPERAS conference, during which we presented this initial work and engaged the wider OPERAS network in the emerging conversations about how to bring these networks and infrastructures closer together. OPERAS, as a stable network of international stakeholders active in the field of open access, with shared values, was mentioned by a significant number of attendants as a potential facilitator of this work, and the idea of proposing a Special Interest Group (SIG) as the home of those conjoined mapping and networking efforts was welcomed by all participants.
Publications
Seeding for a not-for-profit community-led OA books ecosystem. 2025. Copim. https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.d35141ca
Inception of an OPERAS Open Infrastructures for OA Books Working Group. 2024. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15166501
Contact
Toby Steiner (Thoth Open Metadata) – toby@thoth.pub
Joe Deville (Open Book Collective) – joe@openbookcollective.org
Working Group Members
Ales Pogacnik – Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Založba ZRC
Ales Pogacnik is the Head and editor-in-chief of the publishing unit of the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Založba ZRC. Among other things, the publishing house manages the OMP repository (almost 1000 freely accessible books or 60% of total production) and OJS (13 journals + 5 guest journals). Before that, he was a senior editor (mainly lexicography) in one of the largest Slovenian commercial publishing houses for 17 years. E-mail: ales.pogacnik@zrc-sazu.si
Jesper Boserup Thestrup – Royal Danish Library
Jesper Boserup Thestrup started to work with Open Access in 2008 at the Royal Danish Library, as a part of the team operating a local Open Journal System (OJS) server tidsskrift.dk. In 2015, he was part of the team, which established an Open Monograph Press (OMP) server E-books.au.dk. This has given Jesper Boserup Thestrup insight into the problems OA publication of e-books and journals gives publishers, institutions, editors, authors and how to solve many of these problems. E-mail: jbt@kb.dk ORCID: 0000-0002-7974-674X. Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/jesperboserupthestrup.
Kaitlin Newson – Public Knowledge Project
Kaitlin Newson is a Software Developer with the Public Knowledge Project, where she develops open-source scholarly publishing infrastructure, including Open Monograph Press. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaitlinnewson/
Luba Pogosova – Tbilisi Medical Academy
Librarian at Petre Shotadze Tbilisi Medical Academy.
Lucy Barnes – Open Book Publishers, Coordinator Open Access Books Network
Lucy Barnes is Senior Editor and Outreach Coordinator at Open Book Publishers, a leading independent non-profit Open Access book publisher. She does outreach work for COPIM and is on the board of the ScholarLed collective and the OA Books Toolkit. You can find her on Twitter @alittleroad.
Niels Stern – OAPEN Foundation
Niels Stern has worked in scholarly publishing for more than twenty years. Since 2014 he has also acted as an independent expert for the European Commission on open science and e-infrastructures. He is a member of the OPERAS Executive Assembly and the Vice-chair of the Open Book Collective Board of Stewards and serves on a number of advisory boards and committees. ORCID: 0000-0001-6466-9748
Rupert Gatti – Open Book Publishers
Dr Rupert Gatti is a co-founder and Director of three non-profit open access book initiatives: Open Book Publishers, Thoth Open Metadata and the Open Book Collective. He is a founding member of the Open Access Book Network (now an OPERAS SIG). He is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he is a Director of Studies in Economics. His published academic work includes microeconomic analysis of competition and pricing in online and digital markets. He has been involved in a number of UK- and EU-funded OA book initiatives, including the HIRMEOS and PALOMERA projects within OPERAS, and the UKRI- and Arcadia-funded COPIM and Open Book Futures projects.
Working Group alumni: Ronald Snijder, Kevin Sanders