In February 2021, a workshop brought together stakeholders from several European countries to discuss the prerequisites for implementing a functional and sustainable open access book infrastructure. The result was the position paper "Investing in the Open Access Book Infrastructure - A Call for Action", which has now been published on Zenodo.
The paper identifies three policy-related fields of actions in which targeted investment can support the full transition to open access for academic books:
- Engaging people - bringing people together
- Sustaining the technology - providing technology for hosting, dissemination, preservation, indexing and quality assurance in a sustainable way.
- Gathering knowledge - collecting knowledge to critically accompany the Open Access transformation of academic books as well as the implementation of policies on Open Access books from different perspectives.
In a second step, the position paper identifies the current deficits and challenges in the process of transition to a state in which all monographs are Open Access:
- the compatibility of bibliodiversity and scalability
- the lack of knowledge and awareness among book authors and editors regarding the possibilities of OA books
- lack of support for OA book services
- lack of interoperability throughout the system.
In a third step, the position paper's signatories formulate specific recommendations for action in the previously identified fields of political action to overcome the aforementioned deficits and to fully implement the OA transformation to OA books - so the research community and the society as a whole can benefit from it.
The original document signed by the authors can still be signed by supporters: Investing in the Open Access Book infrastructure - A call for action