OAPEN promotes and supports the transition to open access for academic books by providing open infrastructure services to stakeholders in scholarly communication. We work with publishers to build a quality-controlled collection of open access books and provide services for publishers, libraries, and research funders in the areas of hosting, deposit, quality assurance, dissemination, and digital preservation.
SCOSS, the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services, selected OAPEN and DOAB as vital infrastructures to support the transition of monographs and book chapters to open access models. SCOSS provides a coordinated cost-sharing framework for enabling the broader OA and OS community to support the non-commercial services on which it depends. SCOSS encourages the community to support OAPEN and DOAB in its second funding cycle.
The OAPEN Deposit Service supports open access policies of research funders and practitioners (research institutions, universities and their libraries). The Deposit Service is provided to researchers and publishers. The OAPEN Library is adapted to the specific demands for academic books, and deploys the metadata standards, classification schemes and distribution channels for academic books.
Libraries need to know which openly licensed books are published by reputable academic publishers. Publishers of OA books need to become part of existing library discovery systems to reach their target audiences. OAPEN provides freely available harvesting options and daily metadata feeds in various formats to libraries and library suppliers, to disseminate the OAPEN collection.
Making books freely available on the web is only helpful if they are made discoverable. The OAPEN Library is optimised for search engines and is indexed by Google Scholar. In addition to disseminating metadata to Libraries and Library discovery systems, all books with an open license are indexed in the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB).
The OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit aims to help book authors to better understand open access book publishing and to increase trust in open access books. You will be able to find relevant articles on open access book publishing following the research lifecycle, by browsing frequently asked questions or by searching with keywords.
2022 has been an exciting year full of growth and new developments for the OAPEN Foundation, a few of which we highlight below. But first we want to express our gratitude to everyone who contributed to the OAPEN Library or used our services. We’re looking forward to many more years of cooperation in supporting the worldwide transition to open access for academic books…
At the beginning of this year, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) concluded a service level agreement for the use of the OAPEN Library as a repository for DFG-funded open access books. From Spring 2023 onwards, the library will contain monographs and anthologies funded through the Open Access Publication Funding programme and produced in connection with DFG research funding.
The OAPEN Library and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) aggregate open access books and chapters, and make them globally available through several channels. We work together with many organisations, among them Ex Libris. Ex Libris – a subsidiary of Clarivate – is a provider of library services....
We have updated our MARCXML and ONIX feeds, in order to better disseminate the books and chapters in our collections.
