Hi all, Open Book Publishers is looking for a new book designer and typesetter with a passion for open access — please share with anyone who might be interested! https://www.openbookpublishers.com/about/vacancies-and-training

Hi David, excellent question! John makes a great suggestion with OATP, which is really useful in keeping up with new announcements and current developments. The difficulty with any online list is keeping it up to date — as you note, there are a lot of new initiatives like Path To Open launching at the moment. My colleague Tom Grady and I recently…[Read more]

Hi all, next Thursday (17th November) at 3pm GMT we’re looking forward to speaking with OABN stalwart Eric Hellman at our next boOkmArks event, about his work with Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders and how these experiences have informed his perspectives on the early days of open access and more recent developments in OA books.

Eric…[Read more]

Hi all, next week we’re really looking forward to talking to Christina Drummond and Lucy Montgomery to discuss the OAeBU Usage Data project and the new developments the work will take over the coming years:

Wednesday 9th November, 1pm GMT, ‘Open Access Usage Data: Present Knowledge, Future Developments’: Sign up here!

Hi all, join us for an OA Week event on climate justice and open access books on Tuesday next week:

25th October, 3pm BST, ‘Lowering the Barriers to Climate Research: Climate Change and OA Books’: during Open Access Week, we’ll bring together a panel including authors, publishers and campaigners to discuss the impact of open access books relat…[Read more]

A significant new report has come out from TOME: Report: The Cost to Publish TOME Monographs https://aupresses.org/news/report-the-cost-to-publish-tome-monographs/

I am looking forward to reading this closely and suspect it might generate some discussion! I’d be interested to hear any thoughts anybody has.

ACLS is hiring a Project Manager, Higher Education Initiatives: Publishing Initiatives (2-year term) based in New York, to ‘focus on instigating changes in the book publishing ecosystem that would strengthen the goals of the mission-driven constituencies involved, while addressing the risk factors and constituents’ concerns that currently stand a…[Read more]

Hi all, Tom, Agata and I are pleased to announce that the OABN has become an OPERAS Special Interest Group (SIG), and as such it is now formally supported by OPERAS, the European Research Infrastructure supporting open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in the European Research Area.

The OABN will continue to…[Read more]

I’ve been doing some more digging into accessibility resources and have found the following:

– Improving the Accessibility of your Mainstream Digital Content, which seems to be a wealth of resources from the Inclusive Publishing group, coordinated by the DAISY consortium: https://inclusivepublishing.org/about-the-inclusive-publishing-hub/
– The…[Read more]

This channel was set up after the Open Cafe discussion on the accessibility of OA books, at which a number of links were shared, so I will drop them here for future reference:

– EU directive on accessibility, coming into force in 2025: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32019L0882
– OAPEN VPAT:…[Read more]

NEW COLLECTION: Myself and François van Schalkwyk of African Minds have put together a collection of OA book publisher business models, with contributions from a number of presses. The collection is here: https://oabooksbusinessmodels.pubpub.org/

We’re keen to add to it, so if your press might be interested in contributing, take a look at the…[Read more]