We’re hiring! Come and work with us to make the open access book landscape successful, sustainable and scalable. The role is part-time and fully remote.

Open Position: Head of Operations

The Open Book Collective is seeking a highly organised, proactive Head of Operations to help lead the day-to-day running of our growing organisation.

obc.copim.pub

For our latest spotlight, we spoke to @adamcrymble.bsky.social, Associate Professor in Digital Humanities at UCL. Our conversation covered early engagement with open science, his work establishing an open publishing platform, and a recently published open access book. Read it here: buff.ly/Bp3vdkM

Spotlight on Adam Crymble: Associate Professor in Digital Humanities | UCL Open@UCL Blog

UCL Homepage

blogs.ucl.ac.uk

In late 2023, the Society spent a day with Hertfordshire’s historians. We saw the quality, creativity and distinctiveness of teaching, research and engagement. We were told by a (now departed) senior manager that History was ‘a portfolio the university will guard very carefully’. bit.ly/4hLediN

Glen O'Hara@gsoh31.bsky.social · 3d ago

So it's farewell to the History subject area at the University of Hertfordshire, not the first nor the last to go. One of the best departments in the country, just extinguished like a snap of the fingers. Think of the waste. (1/2)

Amazing resource- do consider a monthly contribution if you can afford it.

Internet Archive@archive.org · 4d ago

🌐 On World Wide Web Day, we’re celebrating the Wayback Machine’s milestone of archiving more than 1 trillion web pages, preserving decades of the web we’ve built. Explore decades of web history with the #WaybackMachine: web.archive.org #Wayback1T #WorldWideWebDay @mark.bsky.social

ANTHROPIC: Our son loves humanity and for the low price of trillions and trillions of dollars will usher in an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity! OPENAI: Our horrible oafish son is hacking web sites without our permission. ANTHROPIC: (eyes narrowing) Our son is also evil

It is, in fact, a basic SCHOLARLY principle: acknowledge prior work. It was not MIT Press building the road alone. So many other people laid the path. And influence is not unidirectional. The biggest players should acknowledge even the smallest who influenced them.

Direct to Open: pretty cool. Launched in 2022. [will have been in prep for years] But: Opening the Future (similar collective model): started in 2020 Both owe a debt to lots of other collective models: Knowledge Unlatched, Open Library of Humanities, Open Book Publishers, punctum books, arXiv [!!]

Look, MIT Press are progressive in OA publishing. Heck, I have published with them and have another book under contract with them. But they always think they are the source of influence, never the influenced. They rarely acknowledge the work of others. www.researchinformation.info/analysis-opi...

Amy Brand: Publishing for a new era - Research Information

EXCLUSIVE: The director and publisher of MIT Press reflects on risk-taking, leadership, innovation and human judgement

researchinformation.info

"It engendered a lot of copycat models"... 🤔 Agree w/Martin. None of us are perfect at acknowledging our debts/influences in our excitement at our own contributions, but from what I've seen MIT have never 👏 any of the forerunners of D2O (happy to be corrected!) when talking up their trailblazing.

Martin Paul Eve@eve.gd · 6d ago

Look, MIT Press are progressive in OA publishing. Heck, I have published with them and have another book under contract with them. But they always think they are the source of influence, never the influenced. They rarely acknowledge the work of others. www.researchinformation.info/analysis-opi...

What makes collective funding such a powerful mechanism for open access publishing? ✍️ LSE Press Head of Publishing @philippagrand.bsky.social considers this question and the power of OA funding for our blog @jisc.bsky.social @openbookcollective.bsky.social Read here blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsepress/202...

How collective funding supports sustainable publishing

Diamond open access publishing brings benefits for social science scholarship through increased usage, higher citations and global reach. How does funding help?

blogs.lse.ac.uk

A little treat created by @scholtom.bsky.social and inspired by the Copim report (coming soon!...ish) -- the Copim crew and friends! Tag yourself! (If you're not there though please don't tag Tom as this has already gone through multiple redrafts and it'll make him cry) #OAbooks #OpenAccess

An important #OpenInfrastructure update from the Open Book Collective! 👇 #OpenAccess #OpenInfra

Open Book Collective@openbookcollective.bsky.social · last wk.

‘No open access without open infrastructures.’ Our new document management portal gives OBC publisher and service provider members one place for all their library support, with notifications, multiple users per organisation, and openly licensed code. #OpenInfrastructure #OpenBookCollective

You know what also increased at around the same time? Gold OA retractions. Could there be a possibly be a connection? I wonder (sarcastically)... 🤔

An analysis of the relationship between access models and retractions with peer review issues (2014–2024) - Scientometrics

Retractions are a relevant mechanism for ensuring the reliability of scientific literature. Nevertheless, the incidence of retractions can evidence specific problems in the publishing process. In this...

link.springer.com

Caroline Ball@heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · last wk.

This article estimated global APC spend in 2023 to be around $2.5 billion, which was THREE TIMES the amount just four years earlier in 2019, at around $910 million.

Really missing the artisanal feel of pre-AI email scams

Lots in this -- worth a read! 'People don't want to be isolated, competing with each other as their condition of existence. And so, I think this transition is a moment for us to reflect on the fact that we don't have to just accept these legacy systems that exploit our labour.' #AcademicPublishing

Open Library of Humanities@openlibhums.org · 2w ago

OLH Interview with Semantics of Natural Languages Our Editorial Officer, @maddiesinclair.bsky.social, speaks with the SNL editors about their move to #diamondOA, community-led publishing, and leaving Springer Nature to launch SNL with OLH. Read full interview: www.openlibhums.org/news/977/

OLH Interview with Semantics of Natural Languages Our Editorial Officer, @maddiesinclair.bsky.social, speaks with the SNL editors about their move to #diamondOA, community-led publishing, and leaving Springer Nature to launch SNL with OLH. Read full interview: www.openlibhums.org/news/977/

OLH Interview with Semantics of Natural Languages (SNL)

In this interview, we speak with the editorial team at Semantics of Natural Languages about the journal's transition to diamond open access, the research communities that inspired their approach, and ...

openlibhums.org

This is something we also pick up on in this @copim.bsky.social post -- profit-driven inflation of the quantity of published research is bad for research and for researchers: copim.pub/wileys-acqui...

Wiley’s Acquisition of Emerald: Some observations from Copim - Copim

Copim reflects on Wiley’s acquisition of Emerald and the issues of scale and corporate consolidation in academic publishing.

copim.pub

Martin Paul Eve@eve.gd · 2w ago

"Springer Nature [... issued] an ultimatum about a year ago that we needed to increase the number of papers we accept per year immediately, and by a significant amount". Academic freedom and peer-reviewed quality control at its finest.

NEW POST: 'Wiley’s Acquisition of Emerald: Some observations from Copim': copim.pub/wileys-acqui... The post explores issues of scale and corporate consolidation in academic publishing raised by the acquisition, heightened by the emphasis on the anticipated role of #AI. #Scale #AcademicPublishing

Wiley’s Acquisition of Emerald: Some observations from Copim - Copim

Copim reflects on Wiley’s acquisition of Emerald and the issues of scale and corporate consolidation in academic publishing.

copim.pub

Excited that Alison Stone’s new book ‘The Philosophy of Julia Wedgwood: Imperfect Antithesis‘ is #openaccess! Wedgwood is such an important Victorian thinker - essential reading for history of philosophy & women’s intellectual history! #ethics #metaphysics www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.116...

This is useful advice - I've been guilty of the "use emojis as bullet points" when writing posts before but will try to remember not to from now on.

RNIB@rnib.bsky.social · 3w ago

Let's talk about red flags, and now We're not talking about dating. We're talking about emojis. Emojis are fun, but every emoji is read aloud by screen readers. Too many, or using them within sentences, can make posts much harder to follow. Are your emoji habits are giving green or red flags?

Why I’m a fan of the Oxford comma.

Catch up with this post from our senior editor and outreach coordinator @alittleroad.bsky.social on our membership of @operaseu.bsky.social and the potential of the new OPERAS UK Node to support engagement with the wider European network 👇

Anna Hughes@anna-r-hughes.bsky.social · 3w ago

📣 Find out more about why @openbookpublish.bsky.social joined #OPERASUK How they hope to see the #NationalNode develop & support @operaseu.bsky.social become a #ERIC 🔗 research.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2026/07/1... #Community

The Netherlands' new open access strategy specifically name-checks 'scaling small' & puts community-driven publishing at its core - the very ethos the OBC was built on. Fantastic to see scholar-led values embedded into national policy! #OpenAccess #OAPolicy #ScalingSmall

When 'scaling small' becomes national policy

The Netherlands' new open access strategy echoes the principles the Open Book Collective was built on - 'scaling small' and community-led publishing

obc.copim.pub

On this day in 1981, Richard Cobb got an honorary degree from the University of Essex. That may not seem significant to you, but it makes this afternoon the 45th anniversary of one of the finest graduation addresses ever delivered 🧵

📝 New 'Born Open' post by Firenze University Press #OABooks "FUP follows open science principles for barrier-free dissemination, building on the University of Florence’s early digital experiments that enabled global exchange and high research impact." Find out more 👉 tinyurl.com/36nkjhtm

This is going to be amazing. I am depending on all of us BSky library and library-adjacent peeps to live tweet it so I can learn from it as well!

Copim@copim.bsky.social · last mo.

[KEYNOTE] #ALN26: Reimagining Openness in Academic Libraries Join @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social @openbookcollective.bsky.social in person TODAY (Mon 6 July) @manmetuni.bsky.social 🗝️ Open Access and Its Blind Spots: Rethinking Access, Legitimacy, and Knowledge More detail 👉

[KEYNOTE] #ALN26: Reimagining Openness in Academic Libraries Join @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social @openbookcollective.bsky.social in person TODAY (Mon 6 July) @manmetuni.bsky.social 🗝️ Open Access and Its Blind Spots: Rethinking Access, Legitimacy, and Knowledge More detail 👉

buff.ly

Glorious incidental burn here: "the retreat of Times Higher as the house journal of the sector to rankings, reputations, and rage bait"

Adam Golberg@cash4questions.bsky.social · last mo.

Some thoughts on the planned closure of @resprofnews.bsky.social . And what the lack of media coverage on the planned closure of Research Professional News tells us about what life might look like without a functioning trade media.

Karen Hao has argued that 'AI' is as capacious a term as 'transportation' but we are good at talking in specific & complex ways about different forms of transport, their desirability for different uses (or not), how we want to transition away from some types etc - we need to start doing this with AI

Emily M. Bender@emilymbender.bsky.social · last mo.

So many conversations where otherwise serious people throw around the term "AI" without defining it, despite it being notoriously ill-defined. Thinking about why this might be >>

I've been really enjoying watching the matches in Greece and having no idea what absolute nonsense the commentators are spouting...

Henry Mance@henrymance.ft.com · last mo.

"The dark horses have been bucked out of the saddle again." Make this commentary stop, ITV!