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Annual General Assembly of Custodians (AGAC) 2024

Published onAug 29, 2024
Annual General Assembly of Custodians (AGAC) 2024

The second Annual General Assembly of Custodians (AGAC) of the Open Book Collective will take place on September 11th 2024.

AGAC Agenda

The agenda of the AGAC will include an update on and approval by the Full Custodians of any annual activity reports, financial audits and annual financial statements, and the annual reporting policy for Providers. 

Full Custodians will be able to put forward agenda items for the AGAC.

All OBC Custodians are welcome to participate in the AGAC (although only Full Custodians can vote in binding votes). If you are an Associate Custodian and you would like to attend the meeting, please contact the administrative secretary at [email protected] by September 9th.

Election of Stewards and OA Experts for the OBC Board of Stewards

The OBC is overseen by the Board of Stewards (BoS) as one of its main governance bodies. Each year one third of the 9-member BoS will be up for (re-)election, as outlined in Article 24 and 25 of the OBC’s Articles of Association

The elections for these posts will take place as part of the AGAC. For the next AGAC we will have elections for one Steward representing the infrastructure providers caucus, and three OA Experts. All the OBC member organisations who opted into being a Full Custodian are expected to nominate a representative to attend the AGAC (to assure we reach quorum) and take part in any binding votes, or they will be able to nominate a proxy to attend on their behalf. 

We are happy to announce we have received the following nominations for the Steward of the BoS and the OA Experts positions that are available for election:

Nominations for the three open positions for the OA Experts

  • Holly Limbert (University of Derby Library): Holly Limbert is the Publication Practice Librarian, previously Repository and Open Access Librarian, at the University of Derby in the United Kingdom. Since joining the University in 2019, she has gained considerable experience and understanding of the various challenges which the higher education sector, and academic libraries face relating to the dominance of the mainstream academic publishing industry and the ongoing obstacles this creates for Open Access (OA) and the Open Research (OR) movement on a global scale. This has led her to become heavily invested in the future of alternative routes to open publication such as repositories, and alternative publishing models including the Diamond model of OA, both for journals and books. By encouraging the academic community at Derby and beyond to think more broadly about the choices that they make relating to publication and the implications that this has in relation to equity in research dissemination and the scholarly publishing economy more broadly, she is attempting to affect positive change.

    Along with her passion for non-commercial OA, she is also heavily invested in supporting the increased visibility of librarians and their contributions to supporting Open knowledge. In order to make her passions a reality, she sits on the Open Research Europe Librarian Advisory Group, and the UKRI OA Stakeholder Forum. In January 2024, with her colleague Daniel DeSanto (University of Vermont) she launched the Open Book Environment (OBE) Dashboard, a resource that provides information about OA book publishing options from a variety of publishers to help researchers make informed decisions about OA publishing and to reduce the burden on researchers. It also aims to increase transparency around OA publishing practices. In October of this year, she will also begin her PhD project at the University of Sheffield. The research aims to contribute to understanding the dynamics of Diamond OA adoption and the vital role of librarians in advocating for community-driven OA initiatives in both Western Europe and Latin America.

  • Reggie Raju (University of Cape Town Libraries): Reggie Raju holds a PhD in Library and Information Science and is currently the Director: Research & Learning Services at the University of Cape Town Libraries. He has been in academic libraries for more than 30 years and is the author of more than 80 publications in peer-reviewed national and international journals, chapters in books and a book publication. His research focus is on research librarianship with an emphasis on open access and library publishing. He has delivered a number of keynote addresses on the issue of open publishing. Reggie is an NRF (C2) rated researcher with the research focus of open access. His research activities and practices are directed to influencing the direction of scholarly communication, driving progress towards a more inclusive and accessible future. He advocates for a social justice underpinned open access system. He was the founding member of the IFLA Special Interest on Library Publishing and also serves on the IFLA advisory committee on open sciences. Reggie also served three terms with the Academic and Research Libraries Standing Committee of IFLA. Reggie is currently the Chair of SPARC Africa and is driving the social justice agenda of open access for Africa. He served on international boards such as LPC (USA based) and Redalyc (Mexico based). He served on the editorial board of Journal of librarianship and scholarly communication and South African journal of libraries and information science.

    South Africa is current on a trajectory towards diamond open access and Reggie serves in the capacity of an open access consultant to SANLiC (South African library consortia). He is currently on a national task team serving as open access expert in a national project, commissioned by the South African Ministry of Science and Innovation.  The primary objective of the project is to develop a national plan for the improved accessibility to scholarly research and to improve channels for the dissemination of scholarly research.

     

  • Amanda Ramalho (SciELO Books): Amanda Ramalho is a librarian, coordinator of the SciELO Books collection and member of the SciELO Programme Coordination. Since 2010 she has worked with metadata and publication of open access books from academic and university publishers, distribution of metadata to national and international databases and adoption of open access. In 2023 she also joined Thoth Open Metadata as Latin America representative. She has a degree in Library Science and a Master's in Information Management from the University of São Paulo (USP).

 

Full Custodians will be required to vote even if we have received the same amount of nominations as there are positions available in a caucus. Voting will open on September 10th during the pre-meeting for the members who are unable to attend the AGAC, and the results will be announced during the AGAC on September 11th.

We are grateful to all the Full Custodians for opting to be fully involved in the OBC governance, which as a member-led organisation depends on their contribution. 

We did not receive any nominations for the one open Service Provider position on the Board. However, we expect to be able to shortly announce a new Service Provider that will be joining the OBC, who may be able to also add propose a representative for next year’s meeting.

Banner Image: Photo by SOCIAL.CUT on Unsplash

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