We have released two new COPIM Research Reports last months. The first report is version 2.0 of the report Books Contain Multitudes: Exploring Experimental Publishing, which we released last year and have now updated, incorporating feedback from readers and our community and adding new content. This report has been updated for this version by myself, Simon Bowie, and Tobias Steiner. The second report, Towards Better Practices for the Community Governance of Open Infrastructures, has been authored by Patrick Hart, with input by myself and the COPIM project, and incorporates specialist feedback from COPIM’s WP4 (on Community Governance), and COPIM’s Humanities Commons Governance Working Group.
This research report serves as a resource for both those interested in setting up forms of community governance for their open infrastructure projects, and for COPIM and its future governance community, documenting the process by which the project itself has developed its community governance structures, mostly in relationship to the project as a whole, and to the Open Book Collective (OBC) platform and collective. The report considers various theoretical debates around the politics of infrastructure; the idea of community-led; representation, diversity, and equity; values and principles; voting and consensus; and maintenance and assessment, while also providing links to existing literature, tools, and resources that will help projects develop their own governance.
Books Contain Multitudes: Exploring Experimental Publishing is a three-part research and scoping report created to support the Experimental Publishing and Reuse Work Package (WP 6) of the COPIM project. It also serves as a resource for the scholarly community, especially for authors and publishers interested in pursuing more experimental forms of book publishing. This is the second version of this report (you can find the first version here), which includes feedback from our community, updates, as well as new additions to predominantly sections 2 (typology) and 3 (workflow and tools). For this second version of Books Contain Multitudes we have pulled in resources from another research report we have previously published on reuse and interaction with open access books, from a series of Twitter threads that we have shared online, and from feedback received over this past year on the first version of this report. The resources from this research report and the Twitter threads as well as the feedback received are now incorporated in section 3 of this report.
This report has been produced to support both the development of the ExPub Compendium and the pilot projects we are developing together with partner publishers (including Open Humanities Press, Mattering Press, Open Book Publishers, and the LIBER Citizen Science Working Group). In parts one and two of this report, we situate experimental books in the context of academic research and map current experiments in book publishing in order to create a typology accompanied by a selection of examples of experimental book publishing projects. In part three of this report we then review existing resources on tools, platforms, and software used in the production of experimental books, and we sketch a roadmap and methodology towards the creation of the ExPub Compendium mentioned previously. To support the pilot projects we have made a start with exploring key practices within experimental publishing and the creation of experimental books that will feature within the Compendium: collaborative writing, annotation, versioning, remix, and computational publishing. As such we outline tools, platforms, software, and workflows that support and enable these practices next to describing the desired aspects we argue this technical infrastructure should cover.
OPEN REFLECTIONS 