The Copim community and Open Book Futures are pleased
to announce the launch of the
Experimental Publishing Compendium
https://compendium.copim.ac.uk/
The compendium is a guide and reference for scholars, publishers, developers, librarians, and designers who want to challenge, push, and redefine the shape, form, and rationale of scholarly books. The compendium gathers and links tools, examples of experimental books, and experimental publishing practices with a focus on free and open-source software, platforms, and digital publishing tools that presses and authors can either use freely or can adapt to their research and publishing workflows. With the compendium we want to promote and inspire authors and publishers to publish experimental monographs and to challenge and redefine the shape, form, and rationale of scholarly books.
We are celebrating the official launch of the Experimental Publishing Compendium with a festive calendar on Twitter (#ExperimentalPublishingCompendium) and Mastodon, featuring 24 experimental publishing tools, practices & books from the compendium.
The compendium includes experiments with the form and format of the scholarly book; with the various (multi)media we can publish long-form research in; and with how people produce, disseminate, consume, review, reuse, interact with, and form communities around books. Far from being merely a formal exercise, experimental publishing as we conceive it here also reimagines the relationalities that constitute scholarly writing, research, and publishing. Books, after all, validate what counts as research and materialise how scholarly knowledge production is organised.
We hope that the linked entries in this compendium inspire speculations on the future of the book and the humanities more in general and encourage publishers and authors to explore publications beyond the standard printed codex format.
The Experimental Publishing Compendium has been curated by Janneke Adema, Julien McHardy, and Simon Bowie and has been compiled by Janneke Adema, Simon Bowie, Gary Hall, Rebekka Kiesewetter, Julien McHardy, and Tobias Steiner. Future versions will be overseen, curated, and maintained by an Editorial Board. Back-end coding by Simon Bowie, front-end coding by Joel Galvez, design by Joel Galvez & Martina Vanini.
The Experimental Publishing Compendium is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). All source code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/COPIM/expub_compendium under an MIT License.
The compendium grew out of the following two reports:
- Adema, J., Bowie, S., Mars, M., and T. Steiner (2022) Books Contain Multitudes: Exploring Experimental Publishing (2022 update). Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). doi: 10.21428/785a6451.1792b84f& 10.5281/zenodo.6545475.
- Adema, J., Moore, S., and T. Steiner (2021) Promoting and Nurturing Interactions with Open Access Books: Strategies for Publishers and Authors. Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). doi: 10.21428/785a6451.2d6f4263and 10.5281/zenodo.5572413
COPIM, Open Book Futures, and the Experimental Publishing Compendium are supported by the Research England Development (RED) Fund and by Arcadia.