The closing keynote of the Copim Conference 2026, a hybrid event (26-27 February) focusing on the future of community-led open access books; delivered by Sidddharth Soni, Lecturer in Literature and Digital Culture in the Department of English, University of Southampton, and co-Investigator on the MORPHSS project (Materialising Open Research Practices in Humanities and Social Sciences). The lecture considered the future of the scholarly book amid new digital cultures of writing and reading, ranging from networked archives to experimental scholarly formats to ‘AI summaries’. It inquired how authorship, authority, and intellectual labour are being reconfigured in relation to digital form, automation, and collective access.

The Open Book Futures project is co-funded by Arcadia and Research England Development (RED) Fund (UKRI). Arcadia is a charitable foundation that works to protect nature, preserve cultural heritage and promote open access to knowledge. Since 2002 Arcadia has awarded more than $1 billion to organizations around the world. Research England Development (RED) Fund (UKRI) is a fund supporting institutional-level innovative projects in research and knowledge exchange including collaborations between education providers and between education providers and business.