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Copim Compass. A guide


This toolkit is the output of one of Copim's Open Book Futures project deliverables: to establish a knowledge base to provide comprehensive resources on alternative funding models and modes of publishing, acquiring and archiving open access books, alongside new training and guidance on archiving and preservation best practice.

The aim was to:

  • develop resources for stakeholders,
  • consolidate existing resources,
  • promote business models best practice, 
  • showcase project work on metadata, experimental publishing and archiving.

By providing a comprehensive tool suite of resources we will accelerate outreach to libraries, publishers, academics and the wider public, to advocate for, advise on and encourage open access publishing and initiatives.

In the course of our scoping research and gap analysis, we discovered that a great many resources, guidelines, and toolkits have been developed in the last few years, many of which are regularly maintained and updated, and that many others are currently under development. We therefore developed Copim Compass with two principal aims:

  1. That a valuable exercise would be in collating these existing resources, categorising them, and providing a central signposting location for external resources; aiming to complement rather than re-develop.
  2. One of the major existing lacunae we identified was one which was well within our project competency: a resource on transitioning publishers from closed to open access.  

The Copim Compass is, therefore, a resource of two halves. The first component, which comprises the first four chapters of the resource, detail our model, tools and experiences with Opening the Future, our own Copim project on transitioning publishers from closed to open access. 

  • The remainder of this first section, ‘About Copim Compass’, focuses on the background of, and context for, this particular model, as well as why we believe that collective funding is equitable and sustainable for publishers, authors, and libraries. 
  • The second section, ‘Opening the Future’, describes the model in detail and explains how it differs from other similar models. It also provides some direct feedback from those who have already implemented the model. 
  • The third section, ‘Financial Modelling’, provides the detailed financial modelling spreadsheets and other tools that our participating presses have used, in order for you to make your own calculations. 
  • The fourth section, ‘Workflows and Partners’ provides information about the relevant workflows for using Opening the Future, including details of relevant third party services, licence templates, and a lengthy FAQ that we have built up over several years of outreach and troubleshooting to authors, libraries, and publishers. 

Sections five, six and seven are the other component; the collated external resources. 

  • The fifth section collates and summarises a number of existing resources that provide insights about how to start and/or run an Open Access publisher, covering different areas of the publishing workflow. As far as possible, we have aimed to include non-UK and non-Anglophone resources to make it as broadly useful a resource as possible. 
  • The sixth section collates open access author stories, to indicate the viability of OA publishing and the positive experiences that authors have with the process. These are generally produced by individual publishers and hosted on their own pages, so we felt that collating them could be widely valuable as a resource to support OA publishing. 
  • The seventh section takes a similar principle to the sixth, but instead with libraries. We felt that it would be valuable to collate evidence from libraries trying to direct their funding to OA; demonstrating the processes this entailed internally, and the perceived value of doing so. 

The first four sections will be made available in early 2025; the last three will be updated in the first half of 2025.

The guide will be regularly updated with new resources and tools to ensure they remain current and continue to support best practices in Open Access publishing. 

We are open to feedback and suggestions from the community. Whether you want to share additional resources or have ideas for future sections, please get in touch: ADD EMAIL 

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