Open Access publishing models are becoming more of a norm in scientific journals, OA for scholarly monographs lags severely behind, especially in the Arts and Humanities. Distribution and discovery systems are particularly lacking, and metadata can be poorly integrated and hard to find, whereas major commercial publishers have established workflows for getting books into university libraries. As a result, the gradually increasing proportion of books that are published OA are not effectively accessed by institutions. This paper will present some of the early findings of the research project COPIM (Community-led Publication Infrastructures for Monographs), which seeks to understand and build better infrastructures for publication and distribution of OA books. I discuss the results from workshops and interviews with university librarians regarding the problems of access and making OA books available, then explain the new platform for OA infrastructures that COPIM is presently developing. This platform aims to offer a user-friendly integrated system to explore, discover, access and support OA books from a range of leading OA publishers and infrastructure providers, several of whom we have already partnered with. It will also offer high-quality integrated metadata and fully searchable catalogues. We envisage offering a range of flexible subscription packages to institutional libraries and other end users, and making the search functions and catalogue freely available to all. The project thus utilizes the ethics and structures of knowledge commoning to contribute to a fairer and more accessible publishing landscape.

Community-led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) is supported by the Research England Development (RED) Fund, and Arcadia—a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.