The Copim perspective on Sustainability

This is part of a series of posts on four key Copim concepts: Community-led, Scale, Sustainability and Bibliodiversity.Each post will be linked to the others once it is published.What might it mean to do scholarly publishing in a 'sustainable' way?In this post, we provide some insights on how Copim is thinking and working through this question, opening up some of the different ways in which sustainability can be understood in the context of academic book publishing, and open access (OA) publishing in particular.We suggest that as well as financial sustainability, further dimensions of sustainability should also be considered, and are too often overlooked: sustainability as related to communities, relations, and labour.We conclude by reflecting on whether discussions of sustainability in scholarly publishing could benefit from being coupled to discussions about how to achieve 'resilient' systems for scholarly communication.