Five minutes with Coventry Open Press

Coventry Open Press is a new library-led project at Coventry University. Here, John Atkinson, the University Press Manager, reflects on his first few months in post.

You’re new to open access publishing – what are your first impressions?

I’ve come to OA institutional publishing via a career in more traditional scholarly and educational publishing, including running my own business, which in turn led to a period working at a university press. But this is my first time working within higher education, so it has been interesting to me to be exposed to views and concerns within the sector that you don’t necessarily come across working as, for example, a commissioning editor, when it’s your job to bring in projects that implicitly reinforce a publishing model and way of working that has been predominant and essentially unquestioned for generations. I think a surprise to me is how broad a church the OA community is – there is a wide spectrum of motivations for individual OA initiatives, ranging from the explicitly political to the more pragmatic (i.e., OA as a way of addressing market failure). And then there’s the people working within HE itself who see the pedagogic and experimental potential of OA. At Coventry University we have the Centre for Postdigital Culture, and Janneke Adema of that team has been one of the leading academic proponents of OA, including as a driving force behind the COPIM project.

Tell us about Coventry Open Press

The rationale behind the creation of Coventry Open Press is, I’m sure, very similar to that behind the recent establishment of many other new, library-led open access publishers – a combination of the pecuniary and the more progressive. Consternation at the spiralling charges being demanded both for subscriptions and APCs, and the consequent pressure on already squeezed budgets, is indeed a factor, but so too is the desire to widen the potential readership for high quality research. It was also an opportunity to formalise an activity that the University’s Research & Scholarly Publications unit had found itself being increasingly called upon to support – that of acting as midwife to a number of scholar-led OA journals that academic staff wished to set up via Open Journal Systems software – as well as a recognition of Coventry’s rapid expansion as a centre of research excellence over the preceding decade.

What has been the response from academics at your institution and beyond?

So far, so good! I’ve met with researchers and department heads across most of the research centres and there is a lot of enthusiasm for the principle of OA. Of course, in some disciplines OA is already a pretty common route to publication, so the challenge may lie in persuading colleagues to publish with us, rather than with those publishers with whom they already have an existing relationship. But we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel – if colleagues are happy with the arrangements they have, great. It’s just as important that they embrace OA as a valid option for dissemination of their research than that they publish with Coventry Open Press per se.

Tell us about some of your future plans or ambitions

The ambitions for Coventry Open Press reach wider than merely reflecting the university’s existing academic achievements. We aim to tap into the vibrant and diverse local history and produce publications – be they journals or books, text-based or practice-based – that reflect the university’s place within it. I strongly believe that a university press should at least in part reflect the community of which it is a part. We are also prioritising the sort of transdisciplinary outputs that more traditional scholarly presses might have historically overlooked – for example, Coventry is a world-leading hub of dance studies, through its C-DaRe centre, but by their nature the research outputs resist ‘publishing’ as we commonly imagine it. Coventry Open Press is working with C-DaRe to find a way of ‘curating’ these outputs to extend their life and make them available for future scholars.

Why did you join OIPA?

I’m certain OIPA can be a force for good in making the case for OA not just as the enabling technology to meet necessary funder requirements but as the preferred option for scholarly outputs, and making accessible potential publications that marry academic expertise with community initiatives. There is still quite a bit of fog around what exactly OA is and why it’s needed, even within the academy, so OIPA has a big role to play in widening awareness not just of what it is but why it’s the future of scholarly publishing.

Where can we find out more about Coventry Open Press?

You can find out more about us here and follow us on X/Twitter at @CovOpenPress.