Our communities
At OBP we collaborate with like-minded people and organisations to develop supportive networks and open infrastructures to help grow equitable, community-led open access book publishing. Our approach can be described as 'scaling small'. Many of these organisations are listed below.
We also consider our authors, our advisory and series board members, our Library Members, our volunteers and our peer reviewers as part of the OBP community -- and our readers too! Please get in touch if you're one of our readers and you'd like to tell us more about how you're using our books.
Infrastructure and Training Partnerships
Copim community
Copim is a community that is building and advocating for community-controlled, open systems and infrastructures to develop and strengthen open access book publishing. We are founder members of the Copim community, having taken key roles in the two major projects that initially brought this group together: the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project (2019-2023) and the Open Book Futures project (2023-2026), both funded by the Research England Development (RED) Fund and Arcadia Fund. These projects resulted in the creation of the Open Book Collective (OBC), Thoth Open Metadata, and guidance and resources on topics including accessibility, archiving, experimental publishing and revenue models for open access book publishing. Find out more about Copim's current activities via their website and listserv.
Open Access Books Network (OABN)
We are one of three coordinators, alongside SPARC Europe, of the Open Access Books Network (OABN), a free and open network that enables a community of people to share knowledge, best practices, support and advice on all issues related to OA books via events, blog posts, resources and more. Join the OABN Mailing List or find us at Knowledge Commons. The OABN is also an OPERAS working group, and interested members meet online every six weeks to discuss the OABN's activities and contribute to its work. Contact Lucy Barnes if you are interested in joining this working group and contributing to the OABN.
Open Book Collective
We are a member of the Open Book Collective (OBC), a community and platform developed by Copim to enable presses and infrastructures to seek funding from libraries, and to make it easier for libraries to support mission-driven open access initiatives. Rupert Gatti is also on the Board of Stewards at the OBC. Libraries can support us via the Open Book Collective or via our own Library Membership Programme. Find out more about the Open Book Collective.
Thoth
Thoth is an open metadata management and dissemination system developed as part of Copim, supporting a growing community of publishers to share their open access books as widely as possible. Thoth now powers our metadata management and the dissemination and archiving of our books -- as well as the catalogue on this website! Rupert Gatti is also a Director and the CFO of Thoth. Find out more about Thoth.
ScholarLed
OPB is a founder member of ScholarLed, a consortium of non-profit, academic-led and Open Access publishers that are collectively developing powerful, practical ways for small-scale, academic-led Open Access presses to grow and flourish in a publishing landscape that is changing rapidly. OBP is excited to be part of a group that embodies the spirit of open access, sharing our knowledge, resources and expertise across the consortium to help achieve our ultimate goal: to enable as many readers as possible to access high-quality research, free of charge.
Open Journal Collective
Rupert Gatti is one of three directors of the Open Journals Collective (OJC), an international collective of scholars, libraries, university presses, and non-profit academic publishers. The OJC believes that academic research should be available to all, with no author fees and no paywalls, and it aims to build a sustainable future for academic journals by challenging the profit-making models of global corporate publishing and data systems.
Open Institutional Publishing Association
We are an associate member of the Open Institutional Publishing Association (OIPA). This group is a community of practice for publishing operations affiliated with institutions that are striving for open access, from small and medium-sized university presses to individuals based within university libraries working on scholarly journals. The association supports non-commercial open access publishing within the UK, creating a forum to share advice, information, resources, training and best practice. To find out more or get involved, please visit the OIPA website or contact OIPA.
PALOMERA
In 2022-2024 we were a partner in the PALOMERA (Policy Alignment of Open Access Monographs in the European Research Area) project, which was funded by Horizon Europe to provide actionable recommendations and concrete resources to support and coordinate aligned funder and institutional policies for OA books, with the overall objective of speeding up the transition to open access for books to further promote open science. Read more about our involvement in PALOMERA.
Open Platform Partnerships
The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
All of our titles are listed in the Directory of Open Access Books. DOAB provides a searchable index to peer-reviewed monographs and edited volumes published under an Open Access business model, with links to the full texts of the publications at the publisher’s website or repository.
College Open Textbooks (COT) Education
College Open Textbooks, a US non-profit organisation with the most extensive listing of open textbooks on the web (over 700 titles), is in the process of uploading all our titles onto their site.
OpenEdition Books
Our publications are hosted on the OpenEdition Books platform. OpenEdition is a web portal for electronic resources in the humanities and social sciences hosting Open Access publications from a consortium of over 160 publishers.
Open Textbooks
OBP is a strong advocate of the Open Textbook movement. Our titles are widely available on numerous Open Textbook platforms such as MERLOT, the Open Textbook Library, OER Commons and BCcampus OpenEd Resources.
Accessibility Partnerships
Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB)
We have made all of our books available on the RNIB Bookshare platform, which provides education resources for print-disabled learners, including those with dyslexia or who are blind or partially sighted. We have supplied our titles in PDF and EPUB (over 92% of our books are available in EPUB). Using the EPUB format, the RNIB can make the book available in all accessible download formats, including Braille-ready and DAISY, while the PDFs are available as an accessible PDF.
Library Access Partnerships
Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL)
OBP works with EIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries) to provide three years' free membership of the OBP Library Membership Programme to libraries that are members of library consortia in EIFL partner countries, including Botswana, Kosovo and many more. Through our partnership with EIFL, over 1000 libraries in middle and low-income countries provide all staff, students and alumni with every digital edition of all our titles free of charge, with a discount on any paper copies purchased.
Open Access Organization Memberships
Radical Open Access Alliance (ROAC)
We are members of the Radical Open Access Collective. Formed in 2015, ROAC is a community of scholar-led, not-for-profit presses, journals and other open access projects. The collective promotes a progressive vision for open publishing in the humanities and social sciences and share an understanding of open access as being characterised by a spirit of ongoing creative experimentation.