Opening the Future marks International OA Week 2024!
Posted by Kira Hopkins on Oct. 24, 2024 at 0733
To mark International Open Access Week 2024 (21st-27th October) we’d like to share some relevant updates since the last OA week back in 2023 for Opening the Future (OtF) at large, and for our two current partner presses CEU Press and Liverpool University Press.
Opening the Future and Community
The theme of this OA week is ‘Community over Commercialisation’, a subject that our project has, more widely, published its thoughts on here. Community is something that has always been important to us, and to the wider Copim project/community of which we are a part - in fact the ‘C’ that begins its acronym is ‘community-led’, and an entire work package of the first phase of our project (2019-2022) was dedicated to researching and implementing community governance structures. We have continued our dedication to ‘community’ in the second phase of our project (2023-2026).
As part of Copim, we have participated in many outreach activities for the wider OA and scholarly publishing communities, such as the joint workshop between Jisc and OABN providing a forum for libraries to discuss and collaborate on developing institutional policies for evaluating collective funding models for OA books, and our ongoing project to create an up to date and openly available information hub on OA books, the first part of which will be available by the end of 2024.
We at OtF have recently been considering how we can centre community more concretely. To that end, earlier in 2024 we sent out a call for participants to our new library advisory board, as we realised we needed further community input on their activities, in order to refine our funding model to work as harmoniously with library members as possible. We were grateful for the volume of positive responses we received, and are happy to announce that our first board meeting is in early November, where we will put questions and suggestions to our library board members for their advice.
The past year has also seen several books published immediately and fully OA at our partner presses due to the funding provided by our library members through the OtF model.
A Year of OA for CEU Press
Since Autumn/Fall 2023, CEU Press has published 16 books OA as a result of OtF funding, with more due out later in 2024, and into 2025.. We have been able to watch the number of OtF-funded titles rise steadily since 2020, and the 2024 figure will represent just over half of CEU Press’ total annual monograph publications, an achievement we are very proud of.
Their most recent OtF title is Mariupol 2013-2022, Stories of Mobilization and Resistance by Hana Josticova, investigating acts of mobilisation and resistance in Mariupol, formerly Ukraine’s tenth largest city.
A Year of OA For Liverpool University Press
Since Autumn/Fall 2023, Liverpool University Press have published 3 books with OtF funding, their third one coming out earlier this month, Jurisdictional Battlefields: Political Culture, Theatricality, and Spanish Expeditions in Charcas in the second half of the sixteenth century, by Mario Graña Taborelli, about 16th century Spanish and indigenous interactions in Bolivia and Argentina. Liverpool UP’s fourth title since last this time last year is due out next month: Democracy in Spain: Cinema and New Forms of Social Life (1968-2008) by Isabel M. Estrada
Summary
It has been a busy 12 months for OtF, our presses, and our wider community since the last OA week! As we are in the process of expanding our list of partnering publishers, we hope the next 12 months will be even busier.