Day/time: May 6, 2025, 12:00 p.m. to 1 p.m. EDT
Title: Looking at Accessibility and Archiving of Open Access Books – A Copim Open Book Futures Workshop
Presenters:
- Gareth Cole, Loughborough University Library
- Joanne Fitzpatrick, Lancaster University Library
- Dr Rupert Gatti,O pen Book Publishers, Thoth Open Metadata, Cambridge University
Description: One of the Copim Open Book Futures project’s core tenets is embracing open infrastructures and community led-initiatives. Open Book Futures is all about how to scale and deepen the impact of community-led initiatives working to deliver a sustainable, equitable and bibliodiverse future for OA book publishing.
Our proposed session will take a closer look into the interconnected worlds of Archiving and Accessibility for open access books. We would like to invite discussion around how we can collectively work to ensure that open access content remains freely accessible in the long term. We are keen to hear about the challenges, requirements and practicalities participants have experienced at their institutions. We also want to hear about experiences with accessibility requirements for open access content, responses to changes in national and international legislation over accessibility and digital content, to then collaboratively explore how these might be met through publishing workflows.
Following a brief introduction into our work on Archiving and Accessibility, we invite participants to share their opinions, specific needs, expertise and concerns around archiving and accessibility. We hope for these conversations to be informative for participants, as they will learn about current activities as well as issues faced by other participants, and will also help the team with their work on developing new tools, shape technical protocols and share good practices for open access publishing, so that publishers can help to meet the needs of their readers.
The session will be structured around two core themes, each representing a critical pillar of the OA book publishing ecosystem: 1) Archiving and Preservation: Safeguarding the Legacy of Open Access; and 2) Accessibility: Ensuring Inclusivity and Equity in Open Access. Each theme will be introduced by