Deadline: November 22, 2023

Dear authors, open access publishers, and open source tool and platform providers,

The Open Book Futures (OBF) project is delighted to announce support and funding for three experimental book publishing pilots. These book pilot projects will be developed with OBF’s Experimental Publishing Group supported by Coventry University and will be overseen by the Open Book Collective.

We are inviting individuals and project teams to submit proposals for experimental, long-form scholarly book projects. 

Visit our open call to find out more https://copim.pubpub.org/pub/expub-pilot-call/ 

The call is open to individuals looking to collaborate and to already formed project teams (which can consist of authors, publishers, open source technology and software providers, librarians, and designers). If you apply without a complete project team, we will work with you to find suitable collaborators. Work on the pilots must start on 1 April 2024 and the pilots must be finalised by 1 April 2026. 

Experimental book publishing can include experiments with the form and format of the scholarly book; with the various (multi)media through which books can be performed; and with the ways in which scholarship can be produced, disseminated, and consumed, as well as reviewed, reused, and interacted with. It can also include experiments that reimagine the relationalities that constitute academic writing, research, and publishing, and that speculate on what the future of the book and the humanities might look like beyond the printed codex-format as the standard publication choice.  

We want to work closely with authors, presses, and technology providers to create pilot projects and communities of practice to explore how to best enable and support experimental book publishing together, while seeking to increase the recognition given to work published in non-traditional ways.

Open Book Futures (OBF) is the successor to the Community-led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project which ran from 2019 to 2023. COPIM supported three experimental publishing pilot projects in collaboration with publishers, authors, designers, and tool and platform providers.

We are looking forward to your proposals, or any questions you might have.

Best regards,

Janneke Adema, Rebekka Kiesewetter, Simon Bowie, and Julien McHardy