Reflections on Open Monograph Publishing: A workshop at the 2nd Global Summit on Diamond OA

Copim and the Association of African Universities hosted ‘Open Monograph Publishing: Towards Sustainable Open Access Book Publishing in the Global South Context’ as a workshop on the 9th and 10th December 2024 at the University of Cape Town. This was part of the 2nd Global Summit at Diamond OA, to which we were kindly invited by our colleagues at the University of Cape Town Libraries. The full programme, with speaker slides and links, is now available here. In this post, we will offer a more discursive reflection on our experience, and the work we hope to take forward with our colleagues and collaborators in Africa and indeed, beyond the Global North more generally. 

Copim was represented by Joe Deville and Judith Fathallah (Open Book Collective),Niels Stern and Mary Felix-Maina (OAPEN & DOAB), Janneke Adema (Coventry University), Rupert Gatti (Thoth/Open Book Publishers), Alessandra Tosi (Open Book Publishers),  and Vincent van Gerven Oei (punctum books/Thoth). With the kind assistance of our hosts at University of Cape Town, we received delegates from a wide variety of countries, including Angola, Botswana, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tunisia, Zambia and Zimbabwe. We heard from librarians, publishers and scholars in diverse national and institutional contexts on the progress, achievements and challenges they have encountered as OA advocates in Africa, and were able to share some of our experiences in turn.

The workshop opened with an address from Ujala Satgoor, Director of UCT Libraries, who discussed leading OA initiatives undertaken at UCT, such as the African Platform for Open Scholarship. It was recognised that much work remains to be done with regard to knowledge exchange and understanding the landscape of OA books in Africa, a theme picked up by Judith and Mary in their breakout session on day 2. This led into a series of short talks on why OA is important for books, in which speakers also addressed some of the challenges and successes they have encountered in their local,  national and institutional contexts. Professor Olusola Oyewole, the Secretary General of the Association of African Universities, stated that there is a need to increase the visibility of African scholarship in global indexing and assessment systems, and that Africa has made significant strides towards Open Research. He highlighted present challenges including the availability and reliability of digital infrastructure, funding gaps, and the cultural orientation of some institutions which favour traditional publishing routes. Jill Claasen of UCT Libraries had a notable connected observation here, in her talk: that in some contexts, it is rather the idea of royalties that is seen as legitimating research, not the royalties themselves (which are rarely a significant amount). A mindset change is required, she noted, so that knowledge can be valued as a public good and tool of social justice rather than a commodity whose value is denoted by a monetary sum (whatever that sum may be). We also heard from librarian Mutinta Nabuyanda of the National Institute of Public Administration and Zambian Library Consortium, who described her successful work in capacity building and policy design for OA, and echoed many of the challenges identified by Professor Oyewole (including the need for awareness raising and the need for improved digital and technological infrastructures). Rupert Gatti then spoke on the importance of open licensing for books, rather than simply making free copies available: open licenses mean readers can feel confident in reusing and resharing OA books, as opposed to merely being able to download or read a pdf. Finally, Niels Stern demonstrated some of the affordances the DOAB and OAPEN have, which improve the discoverability and visibility of OA books. This relates particularly to the need to improve the visibility of African scholarship and connect African researchers with relevant, situated knowledge.

We then moved onto some sessions regarding policy making. First, Niels demonstrated the PALOMERA knowledge base where European OA policies for funders can be viewed and compared, and described the planned development of a tool to assist in policy building. Then we heard from delegates in African contexts on their experiences on OA policymaking and promotion of OA within their institutions and countries. Dr. Melkamu Beyene, Chief Librarian at Addis Ababa University (Ethiopia), discussed a strategy of identifying OA champions within institutions, and the necessity of an iterative, back-and-forth approach with all stakeholders including researchers. Josiline Chigwada, who is deputy librarian at Chinhoyi University of Technology (Zimbabwe) and a Collective Development Fund (CDF) grant holder, noted that whilst most Zimbabwean institutions do not yet have an OA repository, the Zimbabwe University Libraries Consortium has a ministerial mandate to develop OA policy, which is encouraging. Josiline also spoke on the need to challenge institutional pushes to commercialization, a running theme of the workshop. Dr. Richard Bruce Lamptey of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Ghana reported on his experience as an early champion of OA: KNUST was the first institution in Ghana to set up an OA repository, and has assisted other universities in setting up policies and workflows. This has improved the visibility and citations of KNUST's research globally and enhanced collaboration. Notably, Dr. Lamptey stated that grant funding has also increased, demonstrating wide-reaching benefits. The final speaker on the policy panel was Dr. Shirlene Neerputh of the University of the Western Cape. Dr. Neerputh highlighted a range of South African collaborations for the progress of OA, notably the South African National Library and Information Consortium. Libraries are taking the lead in promoting OA and Open Science, and there is a budding proposal to build a national platform. Libraries thus have a key role to play in the design and implementation of OA policies. Afternoon breakout sessions covered business models and workflows for publishing OA books, exploring policy development in greater depth, and a discussion of publishing OA books from the author’s perspective. These smaller sessions allowed for more discussion and time for questions and answers. 

The second day began with a panel on Open Infrastructures for OA book publishing. At Copim we have long argued that the OA movement cannot succeed without open infrastructures to enable it. This panel featured Rupert and Joe from their perspectives as publishers at OBP and Mattering Press respectively, Niels discussing DOAB & OAPEN and OPERAS, and Vincent discussing Thoth Open Metadata. Speakers reflected, for example, on how in the OA world, infrastructures for books have lagged behind journals, particularly for discovery and distribution, before explaining how the respective services are changing these dynamics. For example, Thoth is an open metadata creation, management, and dissemination platform specifically tailored to get OA books into supply chains, and OAPEN  provides hosting, distribution, and preservation of Open Access books. For full details of these service providers, see the speaker slides.

Breakouts sessions on the second day covered more on the production of OA books. Kevin Stranack (PKP) and Sai Maharaj (UCT Press) gave a hands on demonstration of Open Monograph Press: a platform for improving production workflows for OA publishers. Judith and Mary presented initial data they have assembled, seeking to map OA book stakeholders in the African context. And Joe and Janneke led and a session on bibliodiversity and social justice as related to OA publishing. Judith and Mary’s work builds directly on our previous workshop at UCT in February 2024, where we had learned that there is currently no map or resources of the various OA book initiatives and stakeholders in Africa, which leads to siloed ways of working, labour reduplication, and missed opportunities for potential collaboration and skilled sharing. Participants were keen to take this work forward with us, and the working group will commence with a first meeting in 2025.

The last part of the workshop was dedicated to rethinking the possibilities of OA book publishing- we heard here from Janneke Adema, who presented the Experimental Publishing Compendium and discussed the potentials of forms of experimental publishing, and from scholar-publisher Francois Van Schalkwyk, the director of African Minds. African Minds is an OA book publisher and OBC member dedicated to publishing books by African scholars and books of special interest to Africa, and utilizes the DOAB/OAPEN infrastructures for metadata and dissemination.

The event was hosted by our extremely capable partners at the University of Cape Town, who were co-organizing not only the workshop but the entire Diamond OA Summit 2025. Conference dinners hosted on site allowed for further networking and collaboration, and the potential for continuing these efforts going forward.

One of the key takeaways from the event was that many of the challenges for OA books are comparable between the African contexts delegates described and the Global North contexts we have become familiar with, inflected as ever by specific locality. There are also many points of convergence in progress made. For example, there are many OA book champions, projects and initiatives spread across Africa, and more are developing all the time. Two of the projects  funded from the Open Book Collective Development Fund in 2025 are dedicated to building capacity for OA books in Nigeria and Zimbabwe respectively. However, fundamental challenges remain. Many speakers raised the point of a lack of awareness and education around OA, and a preference for traditional ways of working. We encounter similar problems, but here is the added complication that African academics are working within a system that privileges Global North scholarship and scholarship in English, and may feel added pressure to remain with traditional publishing routes for the sake of establishing a career. Yet if we can, as Jill Claasen argued, effect a mindset change to seeing scholarship as common good and that books are most valuable in the hands of readers to whom they are most relevant, we can move beyond these ways of thinking. OA book infrastructure is lacking in Africa as it is in many places, but this is changing, as the African Platform for Open Scholarship and the rise of OA institutional repositories demonstrates. The issue of digital connectivity is, admittedly, a difficult one, and not one for which we have the answers at Copim. However, we are confident that thanks to the tireless efforts of our colleagues at UCT and across the African continent, likeminded scholars can work both across and within geographic boundaries towards an ecosystem for OA books that is more equitable, more sustainable, and more diverse than the unjust academic publishing systems we seek to replace.

Therefore, as we look to potential next steps for taking this work forward, we are seeking to establish a discussion group for scholars, librarians, publishers, and other OA book stakeholders in African contexts, including the mapping project. If you are interested in joining us, please email [email protected].