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.
We are pleased to announce that Dr. Kimmo Tuominen, Director General of the National Library of Finland (Kansalliskirjasto), succeeds Bas Savenije as Chair of the OAPEN Foundation Supervisory Board. Kimmo has previously held positions as university librarian at Helsinki University Library, director of the Jyväskylä University Library, head of reference and archival services at the Library of Parliament, and director of the Faculty of Arts Library, as well as several other elected positions in Finland and internationally, providing him with a broad range of experience well-suited as Chair of the OAPEN Foundation.
We’re delighted to share with you how the OAPEN Foundation has developed in 2022 as we remained committed to achieving our mission to increase discoverability and trust for open access (OA) books. Alongside our partners, we continued to operate and develop our open infrastructure services for OA books, providing support to libraries, publishers, and research funders.
This blog post was initially published by Kathryn Napier on the the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI) website on May 30, 2023. The Book Analytics Dashboard (BAD) project (2022-2025) is a 3-year, Mellon Foundation funded project that is creating a sustainable analytics service to support diverse...
Nowadays, we refer to “bubbles” as online places where no information from outside is allowed in. But in this instance, the opposite is true: the bubbles are a tool to help visualise how well one set of books is performing, compared to other sets of books. The OAPEN Library is an open online platform,...
