Collective Development Fund Update: Learning From Our First Assessment Process

The Open Book Collective launched its first Call for applications to our Collective Development Fund on April 16, 2024. We have previously written about the process of designing the Call in consultation with our stakeholder communities – in this post, we’ll describe the process by which we have assessed the applications, and the lessons we have learnt for our second round in 2025.

As described in the Call, we offered a preliminary check for applicants to find out whether their proposed ideas were in scope for the Call, or could be edited to be so. We received 19 scope checks before the deadline of May 10, holding weekly meetings to decide on our responses. Several of these were successfully adapted into full applications, of which we received 35 in total. We continued with our weekly meetings, and after the Call closed on May 31, decided on 8 applications which were eligible and highly aligned with the OBC’s priorities, to advance to full review.

Of those we did not progress, some were out of scope, which stresses to us some clarifications to make in the next round of the Call. The OBC development fund is to support:

• Publication of OA scholarly books 

• Creation and support of infrastructures for the distribution, cataloguing and preservation of OA scholarly books 

• Networks and advocacy for the support of OA scholarly books and infrastructure 

• Other projects building scholarly OA capacity 

We received some applications related to general non-fiction books  or books aimed at children in primary and secondary education. We will clarify in the next round that by ‘scholarly’ we mean related to higher education and above. Some applications were for costs directly related to a single book or project without sufficient demonstration of capacity building, and others were more related to journals than books. Some applications could not be progressed because they did not use the form specified in the Call, whilst others were more concerned with building scholarly capacity and infrastructure in general, rather than related to OA books. In the next Call, we will give examples of the reasons previous applications were not advanced, so applicants can better decide whether to invest time in applying. We will note that only applications using the form will be eligible for advancement, and that if applicants have any questions about using it, they should contact us at the earliest opportunity.

Of the applications we advanced to external review, 2 applied for up to £7,500 (25%) and 6 applied for up o £15,000 (75%). 6 were from Lower and Middle Income Countries (LMIC), 7 were in English and 1 was in Spanish, which we had professionally translated. It is probably too early to draw conclusions from this data about the usefulness of the amounts offered and the demographics of applicants, but we will retain it, and compare it to the results of our second Call.

 We recruited external reviewers from our OBC membership and our broader professional networks, assigning 2 reviewers to each of the 8 applications based on the reviewer’s areas of expertise. These reviews are open by default, and unless otherwise specified, the applicants will receive the reviewers’ comments at the end of the process. The recruitment of reviewers was not difficult, and we are very grateful to all who assisted us in this process. However, we did encounter some problems in attempting to schedule the decision-making panel. We had specified that the panel be comprised of the OBC Managing Director plus at least 2 other Stewards, and members representing the caucuses of libraries, publishers and infrastructure providers. This panel was intended to fall in August, and many colleagues were on leave or busy with childcare responsibilities. In future, we will tweak the timeframe of the Call so that decisions are made either before or after the usual summer break. In the event, we held the decision-making panel on September 3, and did meet the quorum.

The panel was held online using the open-source conferencing software jitsi. It worked well, and participants agreed by consensus to fund 3 projects, subject to ratification by our Board of Stewards. Other than the timing, we will probably run future panels in a similar manner. We met the aim specified in the Call that at least 30% of funding be allocated to LMIC countries. We did not need to resort to a binding vote, though we did take an indicative vote at one point for the furtherance of discussion. Prior to the panel, participants were asked to read the shortlisted applications and associated reviews. We collated the reviewer scores into a table for ease of comparison, but reminded participants that this was for guidance, not a determination.

We began with a reminder of the CDF’s aims, and asked participants to declare any conflicts of interest and raise any perceived issues with the eligibility or legality of the shortlisted applications. There were some minor points of note here, but none that ended up being pertinent to the funding decisions. We discussed the applications in turn, addressing issues such as their importance to the OA ecosystem, feasibility, clarity of aims and outcomes, and relationships with other entities and services. The forms completed by the external reviewers were very helpful. We discussed how the OBC might offer assistance and mentoring for applicants we felt currently not sufficiently developed to fund, but extremely promising and that we would hope may reapply in the future. We were able to arrive at provisional decisions by consensus, and noted some issues for the OBC Management Team to clarify during the due diligence process.

We have updated applicants to let them know that the panel has been held, and that they will be notified of the final results once these have been ratified by the Board of Stewards. In the meantime, the OBC Team has commenced our due diligence processes, with the aim that successful projects may begin by the end of the year. We will announce the results of this process on this blog, as well as feature updates on the progress of the funded projects.

The OBC would like to thank our reviewers and panel members for their participation in this process, as well as our colleagues at SPARC Europe and Invest in Open Infrastructure who provided valuable input on our Call drafts. Designing and administrating our first funding Call as a registered UK charity has been a learning experience for the OBC, and is a fundamental aspect of the fulfilment of our charitable objects. We are excited to observe the progress of the projects funded in this round. Finally, we would like to thank all of the applicants – as with any Call, there were several excellent projects which unfortunately we do not have the capacity to fund at this time, but we look forward to repeating the process in 2025 and the following years.