We are delighted to welcome DOAB/OAPEN as a member of the Open Book Collective!
[,,,]
We are delighted to welcome DOAB/OAPEN as a member of the Open Book Collective!
[,,,]
Ferwerda, E. & Snijder, R. & Stern, N., (2023) “Open Access to Books – the Perspective of a Non-profit Infrastructure Provider”, The Journal of Electronic Publishing 26(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.3303
Abstract:
This article describes the open access (OA) book platforms OAPEN Library and Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), based on 1.the development and activities of OAPEN in the first ten years; 2. the underlying technical approach behind the platforms; 3. the current role of OAPEN and DOAB and future outlook.
OAPEN started out as a project funded by the European Commission, and become a legal non-profit Dutch entity in 2011. It hosts, disseminates and preserves open access books. OA book publishing has been explored in several pilot projects. Its current collection contains over 24,000 documents. DOAB launched in 2012, inspired and supported by DOAJ. It became a legal non-profit Dutch entity in 2019, owned by the OAPEN Foundationand OpenEdition. It’s current collection contains close to 60,000 titles.
The data model of both platforms is optimised for a multilingual collection and supports funding information. Ingesting books has been optimised to support a wide array of publishers and the dissemination of books takes into account search engines; libraries and aggregators and other organisations. The usage has grown in the last years, to 1 million downloads per month.
The future developments entail increased support of research funders with the establishment of a FunderForum and multi-year research into policy development. DOAB will invest more in bibliodiversity, by adding more emphasis on African and Asian countries. Also,DOAB will roll out its Peer Review Information Service for Monographs (PRISM).
OAPEN and DOAB will continue to work on developing reliable infrastructures, policy development and quality assurance around open access books.
by Laura J. Wilkinson
It is with great pleasure and sense of achievement that we share with you today our POSI self-audit for OAPEN & DOAB (download OAPEN & DOAB POSI self-audit PDF).
As you may know, OAPEN and DOAB are separate but interconnected infrastructures for open access books, governed by the OAPEN Foundation and DOAB Foundation respectively. In practice, our small team of nine people works with both systems on a daily basis. But since the two organisations have different governance, we’ve carried out a self-audit for each. We hope you agree that seeing the two self-audits side-by-side helps to compare and contrast the ways they operate.
[…]
The Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs project (COPIM) is delighted that Arcadia and the Research England Development (RED) Fund are supporting a new initiative that will build on the pioneering work of the COPIM project.
The Open Book Futures project (OBF), led by Lancaster University, will significantly expand key infrastructures created by COPIM to achieve a step change in how community-owned Open Access (OA) book publishing is delivered.
Open Book Futures will follow the principles of ‘Scaling Small’ that guided the work of the COPIM project, further developing the infrastructures, business models, networks and resources that are needed to deliver a future for Open Access books led not by large commercial operations, but by communities of scholars, small-to-medium-sized publishers, not-for-profit infrastructure providers, and scholarly libraries.
Among its activities, OBF will deepen and accelerate the work of:
the recently launched Open Book Collective, which makes it easier for academic libraries to provide direct financial support to small- and medium-sized OA publishing initiatives;
the Thoth metadata management and dissemination platform;
the Opening the Future revenue model;
the forthcoming Experimental Publishing Compendium;
the forthcoming Thoth Archiving Network.
Open Book Futures, which will run from 1 May 2023 to 30 April 2026, will increase COPIM’s long-term impact and ensure that a wide range of voices have the opportunity to shape the future of open access book publishing. In order to amplify bibliodiverse and equitable community-led approaches to OA book publishing, OBF aims not just to strengthen existing networks in the UK and North America, but also to engage further with publishers, universities, and infrastructure providers in a diverse set of national and linguistic contexts, including Africa, Australasia, Continental Europe, and Latin America.
With that in mind, OBF will reunite many of the COPIM project partners, including Birkbeck, University of London, Coventry University, Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), Jisc, Loughborough University, Open Book Collective (OBC), Open Book Publishers (OBP), punctum books, Thoth, and Trinity College, Cambridge University, and they will also be joined by a wide range of new partners including Continental Platform/University of Cape Town, the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI), the Digital Preservation Coalition, the Educopia Institute, Knowledge Futures, Lyrasis, OPERAS, Public Knowledge Project (PKP), Research Libraries UK (RLUK), SciELO Books, Scottish Universities Press/SCURL, and SPARC Europe. The project is also supported by Lancaster University Library.
[…]
A new project that works to increase access to valuable research is to receive more than £5.8 million in funding.
Led by Lancaster University, the Open Book Futures (OBF) project will develop and support organisations, tools and practices that enable both academics and the wider public to make more and better use of books published on an Open Access basis. Open Access books can be accessed and used online free of charge.
In particular, the project, which is also supported by Lancaster University Library, aims to achieve a step change in how community-owned Open Access book publishing is delivered.
Funded by Arcadia and the Research England Development (RED) Fund, the project marks a shift in the ambition, scope and impact of community-owned Open Access book publishing.
It will significantly increase and improve the quantity, discoverability, preservation and accessibility of academic content freely and easily available to all.
This will be done by building the infrastructures, business models, networks and resources that are needed to deliver a future for Open Access books led not by large commercial operations but by communities of scholars, small-to-medium-sized publishers, not-for-profit infrastructure providers, and scholarly libraries.
This includes expanding the work of the recently launched Open Book Collective, which makes it easier for academic libraries to provide direct financial support to Open Access publishing initiatives, as well as the Thoth metadata management platform, the Opening the Future revenue model and the forthcoming Experimental Publishing Compendium.
Open Book Futures, due to start on May 1st, builds on the pioneering work of the Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project. COPIM, a strategic international partnership led by Coventry University, began the work of establishing the key open, community-led solutions required to address the barriers to the wider impact of Open Access books.
[…]
“OAPEN and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) are looking for a Community manager, responsible for the development of and engagement with our library community. This is a full-time position (40 hrs/week). OAPEN and DOAB have their offices in The Hague in the Netherlands, but the position is open to working remotely.
The deadline for applications is 31 March 2023….”
The Open Access Books Network (OABN) is working with the PALOMERA project, a two-year initiative funded by HORIZON Europe that seeks to investigate why so few Open Access (OA) funder policies include OA books, and to provide actionable recommendations to change this.
We will be hosting a PALOMERA Series of events that will provide a forum for anyone interested in open access book publishing to:
engage with PALOMERA via the OABN,
contribute your knowledge and expertise as the project progresses,
offer feedback to help shape PALOMERA’s outputs and recommendations.
We want to gather a broad group of representatives from different stakeholders in open access book publishing, as we did for our Voices from the OA Book Community workshop series in 2021, and enable you to contribute to the PALOMERA project via the PALOMERA Series.
Launch event
We will host a launch event on Tuesday 28 March at 3pm BST / 4pm CEST where you will hear from some of the project’s leaders, including Niels Stern (OAPEN/DOAB) and Ursula Rabar (OPERAS/OAeBU). You will have the opportunity to ask questions about the project and to let us know the best ways for you to engage with PALOMERA. The event will also be recorded.
Sign up for the launch event: it’s free and everyone is welcome!
Please also share the link with anyone who might be interested.
“The number of books added to DOAB in 2022 totaled an impressive 18,323. We were also very happy to have welcomed 87 new publishers last year. Currently, there are more than 65,000 peer-reviewed open access books in DOAB from over 600 publishers worldwide. Of those publishers, over 400 added at least one publication to DOAB in 2022.
We are pleased to see so many new publishers joining from Latin America. Our collaboration with SciELO Books (a Trusted Platform of DOAB), resulted in an increased coverage in that area. We are very grateful to have SciELO Books as a partner, enabling us to onboard new publishers, keeping in mind the specific aspects of academic publishing in that area. With SciELO’s help we onboarded the following publishers in 2022: …”
by Ronald Snijder
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. One of their products is the Central Discovery Index (CDI) describing many scholarly and academic sources. When the same content is available through several platforms, CDI deduplicates these records into one unified merged metadata record. It is available for libraries using Primo and Summon. The metadata of the OAPEN Library and DOAB are indexed in CDI.
Recently, we received a usage report from Ex Libris, describing how libraries worldwide interact with DOAB and OAPEN through their catalogues. We are happy to see that more than 1,500 libraries or library consortia have been using the open access books and chapters we provide. To better understand the global impact, we used the Open Alex API to find the countries where the libraries reside, and we found organisations in 118 different countries.
[…]
This month we examine how the growth of the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) has developed over the last 18 months. We look at some key statistics from the Directory and examine the continuing growth in OA Books.
“OAPEN is hiring a Finance and Administration Officer to enable the OAPEN organisation to execute its activities which also includes the management of the DOAB Foundation….”
We are thrilled to announce the launch today of the Open Book Collective! Visit our site to see our members such as Open Book Publishers, the Directory of Open Acccess Books (DOAB), OAPEN, punctum books, mediastudies.press, meson press, Mattering Press, African Minds, and Thoth.
Librarians can see Open Access initiatives, presses & open infrastructure projects, that can be supported via annual memberships that will help these groups to thrive & also contribute to a fund to assist these groups in further developing & bettering their operations.
Supporting members of the OBC contribute to a more durable ecosystem for the long-term sustainability of OA publishers & open infrastructure developers so critical to Bibliodiversity.
Open Book Collective has been developed by the COPIM project and ScholarLed, generously funded by the Research England Development Fund and Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin (grant number 4192).
Visit our website here: http://openbookcollective.org and send any questions or comments to us at: info@openbookcollective.org
by Ronald Snijder
Almost everyone has at one time or another been asked to describe themselves. For the books and chapters in OAPEN and DOAB this happens all the time: many libraries, publishers and content aggregators want to know exactly what is in our collection. In order to answer these questions, we provide daily updated metadata exports – see here (OAPEN) and here (DOAB).
[…]
The Hague, 16 November 2022. The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), a community-driven discovery service for open access books, is launching its Peer Review Information Service for Monographs (PRISM). PRISM is a service provided by DOAB as part of the OPERAS service portfolio.
PRISM is a standardised way for academic publishers to display information about their peer review processes across their entire catalogue. On the DOAB site, you can see a PRISM logo next to a publisher and next to the individual book. PRISM peer review information is also included at the metadata level, making it available through the DOAB API which is freely distributed and incorporated into library search tools worldwide. Learn more about PRISM, including how to participate as a publisher here.
“DOAB and its community have been discussing and developing PRISM for a few years, and following a successful beta-testing phase, we are pleased to now launch the service, inviting publishers and stakeholders to engage with it” said Niels Stern, co-director of DOAB.
DOAB (including PRISM) is overseen by a Scientific Committee, which validates and reviews requirements, and acts as a Board of Appeal for complaints from publishers.
In the summer of 2021, DOAB started a new service in beta phase: PRISM (Peer Review Information Service for Monographs). PRISM’s goal is to provide transparency about the peer review process that applies to the books in DOAB. Services such as PRISM can support research integrity and help build trust in open access academic book publishing.