“Open Book Collective” (OBC) is a platform and intermediary organisation that allows open-access academic publishers and infrastructure providers (“initiatives”) to promote their publishing activities and to sell and manage their funding schemes. OBC wishes to collect revenue from institutions (predominantly academic libraries) in the USA, in the UK, in Europe, and elsewhere worldwide, to retain a portion of this to cover its institutional overhead, but then to disburse the remainder to the initiatives. Its primary corporate function is to act as a revenue collector and payment processor for these initiatives. The initiatives that it supports, as a payment provider, could be of different legal forms (not-for-profits, charities, companies) and will be located worldwide. Given that there is an educational purpose for the public benefit in all of the initiatives that would be supported, OBC could have charitable objects. OBC has no profit-making incentive. OBC may have an employee at a future point with a payroll. It may also own trademarks. It will host a website and own a bank account. This document sets out the specification of the platform that will be build. It sets out key deliverables, target dates, pricing, and understandings. The document is designed to be a point of reference throughout but may change in consultation between the parties as the specification develops.

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.