What is Open Book Futures?
Open Book Futures is a research project funded by Research England and the Arcadia Fund, which follows on from the COPIM Project (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs) as an extension and acceleration to further expand and develop the infrastructures that were first created as part of the COPIM Project. Open Book Futures will also further nurture the 'more diverse, scholar-led, community-owned, and not-for-profit publishing ecosystem that enables smaller and more community-focused presses to thrive and multiply' envisioned at the beginning of COPIM's work, continuing the ethos of Scaling Small (Adema & Moore, 2021).
OBF's 'Work Package 7': Archiving & Preservation of Open Access Monographs
Multiple ‘work packages’ exist in OBF as well as COPIM, covering infrastructure, governance, financial models, metadata, accessibility, experimental publishing, and archiving & preservation. The archiving and preservation work package focuses on ways the small and scholar-led publisher (and potentially some very small library publishers) can be supported in protecting their catalogue and ensuring access into the future. These presses are often run by a single scholar/academic or a small team, are not supported by any institutional funding, are not for profit, and usually have very limited resource: staff, financial, technological (Barnes, Bell, et al, 2022). This led to the creation of the Thoth Archiving Network, a developing network of institutional repositories agreeing to accept open access monographs as a dynamic, open archive for these presses that have no other archiving or preservation safeguards in place.
Piloting participation in the Thoth Archiving Network
After proof-of-concept work was completed in Eprints and Figshare repositories, as well as the Internet Archive, we turned our focus to DSpace, as it is also a major repository software used worldwide. Cambridge University Library (CUL) and their generous Open Research Systems team agreed to work with our developers to create, test, and maintain automated deposit from Thoth into a dedicated DSpace instance. What you see on this site are the deposits accomplished via API from Thoth, including file packages containing book files (usually PDF) and metadata files. We hope to develop a fairly "universal" process that will comply with other DSpace instances used by repositories joining the Network as we expand.
In addition to supporting the OBF technical team with the technical development, CUL is also piloting its participation in the Thoth Archiving Network, over the 3-year period during which the OBF project is running. This participation involves the following activities:
- Provision, development and maintenance of a DSpace-based repository instance as part of the archiving network
- Exploration of advanced content models to enhance the search, discovery, and access to content in this site
- Exploration of approaches and requirements (technical and staff) to the digital preservation of open access books
- To further contribute to CUL’s Digital Preservation Programme by providing an exemplary use case of scholarly content that is "preservation ready", uses open and standard file formats (i.e., PDF and epub) and is accompanied by rich, high quality descriptive metadata.
Participation in this pilot will allow CUL to gather insights about volume of content, required storage and staff resources, as well as helping to estimate associated costs for provision of such a service as well as preservation costs for the longer term, over a 3-year period. This can also inform scoping and development of future services and help to better predict associated costs.