OtF's Library Advisory Board meets for the first time

Posted by Kira Hopkins on Nov. 29, 2024 at 0944

Back in Spring 2024, we at Opening the Future (OtF) were taking stock of the past four years, and the next two. We are no longer a ‘pilot’ OA funding model, but a functional, long-term one funding serious scholarship which has so far enabled over 60 new OA books to be published (around 35 already out, the rest in the pipeline) between CEU Press and Liverpool University Press. 

We have been scaling up our operations by onboarding new publishers, and are considering how our processes can be improved, as well as looking to our longer-term sustainability. We have also been, along with our Copim colleagues, considering what it means to be a ‘community-led’ project. This is slightly different for us than for our sister work packages the Open Book Collective and Thoth, both of which are embodied legally, and have therefore set up robust community governance structures. Opening the Future, meanwhile, is a funding mechanism that embeds into publishers, although it is embodied in another sense by the two FTE who develop it, do library and publisher outreach and do a share of the day-to-day admin. As a result, our need for governance is different and less formal. Nevertheless, we at OtF feel it is extremely important to centre the library community who provide the funding for our initiative - to make sure that community means more than just accepting their money. That it also means receiving guidance, feedback, and criticism from them, as equal stakeholders in this endeavour with publishers, and stakeholders with extremely relevant knowledge to share.  

For these reasons, we decided to set up our own Opening the Future Library Advisory Board, and advertised for members in April 2024. We were very grateful for the volume of positive replies we got, both from supporting institutions and from unaffiliated libraries, and set to work devising our terms of reference, based on those of our Copim colleagues, and ultimately rooted in the work the first phase of Copim did on community governance. 

We and our Board of around twelve members had our first meeting earlier this month. It began with a brief overview of our model and of some of the issues and uncertainties we have been grappling with, and we received extremely helpful suggestions and advice on how the model works in their own workflows, what they perceive the benefits of participation to be, on how we can make sure that these are clearly outlined for prospective library members, and other topics. The conversation was extremely stimulating and useful (and has generated a to-do list!), and we would like to thank our members again for generously giving us their time and expertise. We look forward to discussing things with them again next quarter.