We recently welcomed Coko as a new OASPA member in the Supporting Services and Infrastructure (Non-Commercial) category. Coko joins almost 180 total members, and 30 other organisations within this category that provide significant services and/or support to open access publishing.
We asked Adam Hyde, Founder of Coko, a few questions so we could learn more about the organisation and its connection to open scholarship and their decision to become an OASPA member.
Tell us a bit about your organisation and the service it provides.
Coko is a non-profit that builds technology and facilitates community around better, faster, more open forms of publishing.
Why did you decide to join OASPA?
After attending the 2019 conference OASPA felt like a familiar place.
Shared goals, many of the people pulling in the same direction with similar challenges. It was good to be in a space where community is understood and ‘open’ doesn’t have to be explained or defended.
What do you hope to get out of OASPA membership?
To meet more folks in the network/community. It is really a sense of solidarity and going forward together that we at Coko are always looking for but we have only found it in a few places. The OASPA community is one of those places and we look forward to meeting new friends through our continued engagement.
What are the short and medium-term priorities for your organisation in relation to open scholarship?
To revolutionize publishing forever. It shouldn’t take long 😉 We are bringing out a new platform – Kotahi (https://kotahi.community) that is possibly of some interest to the OASPA community. It offers support for legacy publishing models as well as new ways of publishing. Our short to medium term priority is to convince folks to try it out.
What do you think are the main challenges for scholarship generally in the near future?
From our point of view it is the need to drive down the speed and cost of communicating open scholarship. To do it better, more cost effectively and faster than the non-open alternatives we need better workflows and better workflows need better technology.
How do you think OASPA can help mitigate those challenges?
By facilitating this community to talk to each other. For us that would mean discussions can evolve formerly or informally that may help publishers understand the technologies that are on offer as the landscape can sometimes be confusing.
Thanks to Adam for helping us to learn a bit more about Coko. You may be interested to learn about Coko’s Open Publishing Fest which is happening now (November 8-21) as well as its Open Publishing Awards.
You can see the list of our growing list of OASPA members here. Please get in touch with our membership coordinator Lulu Stader if you have any questions about membership.