18 Thoughts for 18 Years: A Birthday Message from OBP
Open Book Publishers (OBP) turns eighteen today! As we reach our maturity as official publishing ‘adults’, we have dipped into our story so far and pulled out eighteen thoughts on our experiences of scholar-led, open access book publishing.
(We also find ourselves wondering whether reaching eighteen officially qualifies us as ‘sustainable’ yet…)
So here we go:
- Try it and see!
As co-founders and directors Alessandra Tosi and Rupert Gatti explained when the press turned ten, “Our approach was very much: we’ll try, we’ll see if it works.” Over eighteen years, OBP has grown from publishing one book a year to publishing around 60 books a year, from developing software and processes for our own use to developing infrastructures to support other publishers facing similar issues, but that progress was gradual, focused, embraced experimentation (recognising trial and error as a process) and began by just getting started on a small scale. - Seek advice from peers
There are now networks of scholar-led, institution-led and community-led presses in different countries, as well as other open publishing networks to go to for help and advice, including ScholarLed, Copim, the Open Access Books Network, OPERAS, the Radical Open Access Collective, and OIPA. Individual presses are also generally eager to help peers who might want to launch a new press and can offer advice and support. - Find supportive authors #1
The first book OBP published was actually republished: William St Clair’s That Greece Might Still Be Free, which had fallen out of print in the years since it was first published by another press: open access gave it a second life. William became a much-valued co-director of the press, and Alessandra and Rupert asked the Modern and Medieval Languages library in Cambridge for a list of their most-borrowed books, writing to a number of authors on the list to see if any of them were interested in their work being republished by OBP. Robert Phillip Kolker agreed to us republishing his film studies classic The Altering Eye, and Gossman generously offered his new manuscript, which became Brownshirt Princess. - Find supportive authors #2
A publisher survives and thrives because authors support it by choosing to entrust it with their work. Other academics give their time and expertise to peer review manuscripts, or bring their series idea or serve on series editorial boards, or sit on an advisory board. Any publisher is successful because of the generosity of its authors and of the broader academic community, and we are hugely grateful for eighteen years of this generous support. - Know that people will tell you that you can’t do it—try it anyway
When OBP began eighteen years ago, Alessandra and Rupert received a lot of feedback that what they were attempting was impossible; that they lacked the knowledge and resources to be successful; and that book publishing was best left to the people who were already doing it. But they had faith that a new and more nimble, innovative approach could be successful. - Find your co-conspirators in publishing
Throughout the life of the press, we have sought out people interested in open books and open infrastructures, who share our values and who are stimulating to work with. Communities including Copim, ScholarLed, OPERAS, OIPA, ROAC and others have given us opportunities to shape and hone our ideas through collective work (and occasional collegiate disagreements), by being inventive and ambitious to build things together, and by offering sociability and support in good times and bad. We’ve found that having a network of colleagues to bounce ideas off, share frustrations and create things with is essential. - Disagreement can be useful
Sometimes people who don’t share your aims will make pertinent points, and thinking through why you disagree with an argument can clarify your own ideas. Antagonists can be valuable as well as allies! - Keep talking
You have to keep advocating for the changes you want to see happen in scholarly publishing—speaking to different groups and making the same arguments can feel repetitive over time, but it is how change happens. Persistence is key. - Be prepared to be asked if you’re ‘sustainable’
A reflexive challenge to anything new (or even not so new) in scholarly publishing is the question of whether it is ‘sustainable’. Sometimes this means ‘will you still be around in five years’ time’ but sometimes it means ‘is this commercially scaleable’—which might not be what you want in any case. ‘Sustainability’ is not an inherent property of an organisation or a model, but a result of the choices of others. OBP has been sustained for eighteen years by the authors, librarians, funders and other supporters who have invested their money, research, time and expertise into what we do; just as other organisations (including large commercial publishers) are sustained by those same things. Are we sustainable? Well, we have been sustained so far. - Value librarians—along with authors, they are your biggest supporters
The Library Membership Programme that we introduced around 2015 has been hugely significant for us financially, supplying a reliable revenue stream that has enabled us to take on more staff and gradually grow the number of books we publish. Our library supporters have stuck with us even during tough times. They have also invited us to speak to their authors and students, given us advice and feedback, championed us to their researchers, created metadata for us, and worked with us on projects such as those implemented by Copim, advocating for and helping to build community-led, Diamond, open publishing alongside us. They are our financial supporters, but they are also our allies in opening research equitably. - Being smaller can make you more resilient, responsive and innovative
Being smaller is often considered a vulnerability, but it enables us to make quick decisions and be nimble to react to changes and opportunities – whether those are changes within scholarly publishing, or global crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. - Infrastructure is essential
One of Copim’s mottoes is ‘no open access without open infrastructure’ and we would agree wholeheartedly. If your workflows are locked in to proprietary commercial software, then your press is dependent on those companies (and contributing to their success). We are not perfect in this regard—there are certain commercial tools we still choose to use for now—but the bulk of the core infrastructure that we rely on is open source and community-led, including Thoth Open Metadata (which generates and distributes our metadata in multiple formats, powers our catalogue, and underlies our website), the OPERAS Metrics Service (which consolidates our usage data via Thoth), and our accessibility software. - You need allies to make change
Finding your co-conspirators in publishing (see #6) is a necessary first step to making bigger changes as a smaller organisation. We have embraced the principles of ‘scaling small’ by being part of communities that build infrastructures and make arguments to achieve significant change in open scholarly publishing. To do that, you have to nourish your communities and think about what you can contribute—not what you can extract. Be generous in sharing knowledge, time, ideas, and other forms of support and resources with your allies and those who share your values. - Demonstrate an alternative
The continued existence of scholarly presses that have been publishing high-quality, open access books without relying on author fees for eighteen years (or ten years, or five years) is immediately a contradiction to the argument that this model of publishing ‘can’t be done’ or ‘isn’t sustainable’ (see #9). - Keep knowledge free… from interference
The open accessibility and free circulation of knowledge is of increasingly critical importance in a world beset by major challenges, one of which is the existence of authoritarian governments that seek to influence, obscure, or even, in some areas, eradicate scholarly research. In this environment, open access makes a vital contribution to the persistence of knowledge free from political interference. - Success is defined by your actions today, not by your future plans
Every title we have published and will publish is a ‘success’. It is another work freely available to the world that might have been locked away behind a paywall otherwise. Even if we stop publishing today, we will have published nearly 500 titles that are now openly available for the world, and will remain so for as long as our archiving and preservation strategies are successful. - Don’t do it for the money
If financial profit is an objective, you’re in the wrong business. Seriously, everything is distorted with a business model that seeks to maximise the profits from scholarly publishing—whatever your uses for those profits are! Covering operational costs is clearly a necessity; surpluses allow you to better achieve your objectives. Profits do not. - Focus on the mission—not the institution
OBP itself is not important. What OBP does is important.