Community-Led Publishing

The library is a key partner in a $3.6 million international project to envision a new ecosystem for open access publishing

Photo by Terry Wimmer, courtesy UCSB Current.

Photo by Terry Wimmer, courtesy UCSB Current.

An ambitious project to develop new and innovative open access publishing models just got a major funding boost from Research England, and UC Santa Barbara is among the principal partners.

The $3.6 million, three-year project (to be funded with £2.2 million from Research England and £600,00 from the partners) will support Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM), a project designed to transform open access (OA) book publishing in the humanities and social sciences to a more horizontal and cooperative, knowledge-sharing approach, and ultimately to help ensure that publicly funded research is widely and freely accessible to all.

The project will be led by Coventry University, with key project leaders including Sherri Barnes, the UC Santa Barbara Library’s scholarly communication program coordinator, and Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy, founder and co-director of Punctum Books and the campus’s Arnhold-Punctum Publishing Lab, a scholar-led monograph publishing collaboration with the library and UC Santa Barbara’s Writing Program.

Providing Access to Scholarship

“COPIM puts UC Santa Barbara in a leadership role with regard to the transition to open access in monograph publishing,” said Barnes. “Scholar-led OA publishing is author-centered, mission driven, and cooperative. Scholars are at the center of the editorial work, with librarians and technologists applying their expertise as stewards of the scholarly record. We’re working to solve big and important problems that empower faculty authors, libraries, and universities, while returning some of scholarly publishing to the academy.”

“The University of California is very committed collectively — not just the libraries, but faculty leadership and administrators, including UC President Janet Napolitano — to opening up scholarship created by UC researchers to be freely available to all to read and make use of,” said University Librarian Kristin Antelman. “Making good on that requires the investment of time, effort, money and political capital toward transforming the current, very closed, scholarly publishing system for both journals and books.”

While the COPIM project focuses on book publishing, the issues surrounding both book and journal publishing are highly intertwined and part of a larger UC commitment to find sustainable and more transformative models for scholarly communication, as laid out in the UC Libraries’ “Pathways to Open Access” document released last year.

“The rising cost of journal subscriptions has also edged out the budget for books,” explained Joy. “More books are being published by more scholars than ever, and libraries are purchasing fewer of them. Some libraries have said maybe we won’t even be able to buy books at all if the journal subscriptions keep going up.”

Added Antelman, “When I started as a librarian around 1990, there was kind of an unspoken goal that you tried to balance your collections budget 50/50 between journals and monographs. The current balance in research libraries is closer to 80/20 in favor of journals. That whole balanced model was thrown out as journals became more and more expensive.”

The open access press Punctum Books is a COPIM participant, courtesy photo.

The open access press Punctum Books is a COPIM participant, courtesy photo.

Addressing the Hurdles

COPIM’s goal is to address the key technological, structural and organizational hurdles — around funding, production, dissemination, discovery, reuse and archiving — that are standing in the way of the wider adoption and impact of OA books. Joy, one of the authors of the grant proposal, noted, “COPIM involves fundamentally re-imagining the relationships between key players in academic book publishing.”

Further manifesting the concept of open access, as the team was writing the grant, they made it public on a website, “so people could see what we were doing, and with Hypothesis annotation software they could give us notes,” Joy said. “We are five presses run by academics and we’re trying to do things a little bit differently. We are working on questions like, ‘How can we create the tools for publishing more accessible and open source and how can we rewire the business model in collaboration with libraries and publishers?’

“We want to try to move to a model where everything’s in daylight, everything’s transparent and the books themselves are community-controlled and community-owned, and everything is done in collaboration and not competitively,” she continued. “It’s going to be interesting to see how that develops.”

The effort funded by COPIM includes seven interconnected work packages, two of which will be concentrated at UC Santa Barbara. The first, led by Joy in collaboration with Joe Deville of Lancaster University, will create new funding channels for open access book publishing, including devising new consortial funding models designed to maximize the ability of libraries to directly support open access publishers and content that best serves the needs of their highly localized constituencies.

The second, led by Barnes in collaboration with Janneke Adema of Coventry University, will develop new open access community governance models that will support the needs of a valuably diverse and hybrid community of open access publishers.

A Collaborative Effort

However, cooperation will be a common thread throughout all areas of the COPIM project.

“Collaboration is core to scholar-led OA publishing,” said Barnes. “We’ll be reaching out to international library organizations, societies and scholars, librarians and publishers, committed to building a more diverse scholarly communication system.

“Many UC Santa Barbara faculty members are also publishers and active members of their respective societies’ publishing programs,” she continued. “Their input will be valuable. There will be opportunities for faculty and students to participate in workshops and public events that will be held at UCSB. I encourage faculty and graduate students to join UCSB’s Scholarly Publishing and Communication Discussion List to stay abreast of developments and related local programming.”

Additional project participants include representatives from Birkbeck, University of London; Lancaster University; Trinity College, Cambridge; the Loughborough University Library; the ScholarLed consortium of established open access presses (Open Book Publishers, punctum books, Open Humanities Press, Mattering Press and meson press); infrastructure providers Directory of Open Access Books and Jisc; and the international membership organization The Digital Preservation Coalition.

Originally published in The Current (UCSB) on June 25, 2019.

UCSB Commencement 2019: Navigating the Vast Unknown

Graduate Division keynote speaker uses her own journey to inspire and uplift others

In the Samala Chumash language, the word “kalašpi” means “breathe on.” It also is the title of the speech Nicolasa (Niki) Sandoval will deliver as the keynote speaker at the Graduate Division’s 2019 commencement ceremony. A lecturer in the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, Sandoval earned her Ph.D. at UC Santa Barbara in 2007.

Niki Sandoval, courtesy UCSB Current.

Niki Sandoval, courtesy UCSB Current.

“Kalašpi,” Sandoval explained, is inspired by the work of graduate student and optical oceanographer James G. Allen. “As a scientist who draws from cartography, meteorology and geography, Allen’s research represents the currency and relevance of a rich, interdisciplinary graduate education that is unique to UC Santa Barbara,” Sandoval said. “I am utterly captivated by the fact that the ocean is breathing. The deeper the breath, the more turbulent the churning that happens in the darkness of the abyss, the more productive for life on earth.”

There are clear parallels with the process of engaging in advanced study and the extraordinary contributions of UC Santa Barbara’s graduates. “The churning they have set in motion through their work, their persistence through the enormous swells, and the new knowledge they are breathing into our world, illuminates our way forward,” she said.

Sandoval is no stranger to the concept of illuminating the way forward. As the first descendant of the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians to earn a doctorate, she said she “learned to navigate a vast unknown, with the assistance of good-hearted people who held high expectations for me, and is committed to being of service to others.”

Twice appointed by former California Governor Jerry Brown to the State Board of Education, where she currently serves, Sandoval says that her perspective and voice as a Native person and a Latina from the Central Coast region are important, but her primary task is to listen to diverse stakeholders. “Through my life experience and advanced study at UC Santa Barbara, I am keenly aware of inequities and systemic dysfunction that have plagued our educational systems,” she noted. “I hold open the possibility that growth occurs through conflict and that addressing the root cause of the conflict has a restorative effect. This transforms the challenge into an opportunity for growth and positive change.”

She acknowledges this is an uncomfortable but necessary tension to hold. “As a member of the California State Board of Education I am one of 11 people who set policy for more than 6 million students in grades K-12,” Sandoval said. “We adopt curricular frameworks and materials you see in classrooms and we aspire to make sure that all students are graduating ready for college and a career.”

Sandoval is also the education director of the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, where she oversees a staff of 47 and works with elected tribal officials to guide educational policies and strategic investments to improve academic outcomes, promote self-sufficiency and nurture the next generation of leaders from birth through career.

In addition, as a lecturer at UC Santa Barbara, she has worked with more than 1,000 students seeking to become teachers, school psychologists or guidance counselors.

“Inviting out each person’s gifts requires connection, deep listening, and a lot of time. It also requires an understanding that there are different pathways through the educational process that are valid,” Sandoval said. “The ability to help others advance in their education, career, and fulfillment is a powerful reward.”

The Graduate Division Commencement Ceremony will take place Friday, June 14, at 1 p.m. on the Commencement Green.

Originally published in The Current (UCSB) on June 11, 2019.

Art on Deck

Click here to see the story:

805 Living Pulse Jun 2019

Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Inga Guzyte, courtesy photo.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Inga Guzyte, courtesy photo.

Using recycled skateboard decks as her medium, Inga Guzyte (ingaguzyte.com) transforms her passion for skateboarding into sculptural art. Her new #RebelWomen series spotlights women from around the globe—Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Malala Yousafzai, Frida Kahlo—emphasizing their strength, courage, fearlessness and wit.

“I am hoping to share rebellious and empowering stories,” says the 34-year-old artist, who lines her Santa Barbara studio with floor-to-ceiling stacks of skateboard decks (recycled from the nearby Lighthouse Skateshop) and waits for the right colors to show up before creating her sculptures. Born in Lithuania, and raised in Germany, she came to Santa Barbara at age 21 to learn English and immerse herself in the California skateboarding culture. Making her way into the male-dominated sport influenced her work.

Inga Guzyte self portrait, courtesy photo.

Inga Guzyte self portrait, courtesy photo.

“Inga’s work is an exciting combination of vision, originality and high craft,” says Nathan Vonk, owner of Sullivan Goss Gallery (sullivangoss.com) in Santa Barbara, where a solo show of Guzyte’s work appears from June 1 through July 23. “While her pieces are made from brutal, broken materials, the finished products are both sophisticated and delicate,” he says. “With her #RebelWomen series, she has added to that appeal by including a message that is powerful, important and uplifting.”  

Originally published in the June 2019 issue of 805 Living Magazine.