Workshop 10 | Evaluating and Assessing Diamond Open Access Book Initiatives: Challenges and Opportunities
Room: Andreas Themistokleous – Room Ammochostos
Organised by Open Book Collective and the Directory of Open Access Books
Speakers: Kevin John Sanders, Niels Stern, Giulia Trentacosti, Joe Deville
There has been a rapid expansion of Diamond open access book initiatives looking to partner with libraries in pursuit of creating a sustainable, community-led approach to open access publishing for long-form research and scholarship. Although generally a positive development, this growth does create a need for libraries and publishers to have reasonable and clear expectations for such partnerships. In order for these expectations to be transparent and open, many libraries are looking for criteria to help them evaluate and analyse publishing and/or infrastructure initiatives, to ensure their budgets and strategies can support sustainable and fair Diamond open access book publishing.
The workshop will allow participants to learn from different experiences of evaluating and analysing Diamond open access book publishing initiatives in a range of contexts. Following the sharing of these experiences, participants will begin to collaborate on a list of principles for fair assessment of Diamond OA publishing initiatives, relevant to the breadth of LIBER’s diverse community of libraries.
With a range of initiatives being developed to appraise the quality of publishers and their offerings in journal publishing, notably in the DIAMAS project and elsewhere, we are keen to investigate the opportunities and challenges for European academic libraries and institutions to create evaluation and assessment tools for books, to help appraise the quality of a service and its offer(s) in support of open science for wider society.
Led by the Copim Open Book Futures project, this workshop brings together a series of presentations on experiences of confronting and conducting the evaluation of OA book initiatives. This includes presentations from the Open Book Collective and the Directory of Open Access Books about the conversations and feedback they have had from different types of library in different countries, alongside two perspectives from Open Science teams in different libraries about their dynamics and expectations when partnering with a Diamond open access book publisher.
The results of the workshop will be disseminated online, to inform the development of approaches for the analysis and evaluation of Diamond open access publishing initiatives, with the longer term aim of fostering the future of long-form open access publishing for an innovative and open future for libraries.