“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.
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.
[…]
“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 world’s largest disciplinary open access initiative, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP³), has officially launched a new initiative to make books in particle physics and related domains fully open access, under the SCOAP³ for Books program.
Since the launch of SCOAP³ in 2014, the transition to open access for scientific articles in particle physics has progressed rapidly. Over 90% of the annually published scientific articles in High-Energy physics have been made free for both readers and authors worldwide. The SCOAP³ for Books program is the latest effort of the global collaboration to expand the content made openly available to include academic books in particle physics and neighboring disciplines (including accelerator physics, instrumentation, etc).
Funded through the generous support of hundreds of institutions from within the collaboration, SCOAP³ has secured partnerships with leading academic publishers (including Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and World Scientific) to make over 100 textbooks and monographs fully open access as part of the SCOAP³ for Books pilot. This new collaboration includes a partnership with OAPEN, a leading open access books library and publication platform that supports SCOAP³ for Books by providing services in the areas of hosting, dissemination, digital preservation, and analytics….”
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.
During the UKSG 2022 Annual Conference held from May 30th to June 2nd in Telford UK we officially launched the OAPEN Dashboard1 – a new analytics service for our library members, publishers and funder partners to help them gain a deeper understanding of the usage of open access books.
Over 179 publishers, libraries and funders are using the dashboard today and we expect to welcome more users over the coming months. The dashboard service includes data for the entire OAPEN Library which is home to over 24,000 open access books that see over 1 million COUNTER-conformant downloads per month.
“As of June 2022, the UG became a sponsoring member of OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks). The OAPEN Foundation is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to open access, peer-reviewed books. Its core mission is to increase the discoverability of open access books and to build trust around open access publishing….”
The OAPEN Foundation is looking for a project manager to help us with promoting and supporting the transition to open access for academic books.
The Position
The project manager will be involved in the various international projects OAPEN participates in to advance open access for books, delivering on the project activities of the foundation. Next to this, the project manager will perform tasks related to the technical operation of its three platforms and services. Finally, the project manager will assist with the financial administration of the foundation.
In 2021, DOAB and OAPEN entered into a new partnership with LYRASIS to develop its services for U.S. partners. As the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) continues to grow, now including well over 50,000 open access books, Sharla Lair, Senior Strategist of Open Access and Scholarly Communication at LYRASIS, and Tom Mosterd, Community Manager DOAB-OAPEN recently discussed what libraries, publishers and other U.S. partners may expect from both open infrastructure services for open access books in the near future.
SciELO Books is celebrating ten years of operation focused on the development of infrastructure and the capabilities of scholarly book publishing in a digital format following the state of the art.
As part of the event celebrating the ten-year anniversary, intended as a forum to recognize the advances and challenges, and, mainly, to debate on the future of digital books in the light of open access and open science, we’ve interviewed speakers and officials from institutions directly linked to the development of SciELO.
We continue the series of interviews with Niels Stern, director of the OAPEN Foundation and co-director of the DOAB Foundation.
In 2021, DOAB and OAPEN entered into a new partnership with LYRASIS to develop its services for U.S. partners. As the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) continues to grow, now including well over 50,000 open access books, Sharla Lair, Senior Strategist of Open Access and Scholarly Communication at LYRASIS, and Tom Mosterd, Community Manager DOAB-OAPEN recently discussed what libraries, publishers and other U.S. partners may expect from both open infrastructure services for open access books in the near future.
Snijder, R. (2022, March 11). OK Computer, what are these books about? – An experiment in large-scale classification of open access books. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/xdhuq
Introduction: Can we automatically classify a large collection of open access books? This paper describes an experiment using the entity-fishing algorithm: it scans texts for terms that can be linked to Wikipedia pages. Based on the algorithm’s results, new keywords are added to the book descriptions, plus a list of relevant Wikipedia pages. Description: In the OAPEN Library, the full text of 4,125 books and chapters in English and in German was analysed by the algorithm, resulting in a data set of 25 million records. The entity-fishing algorithm is not always aware of the context and the language of the books is another factor. Instead of blindly picking the most frequent Wikipedia pages, the results were filtered using a confidence score, plus a manual check. This brought the number of possible entities down from 25 million to slightly over 22,400 – a reduction of 99.9%. Evaluation: The goal of the experiment was to find only the most suitable Wikipedia pages to describe the books and chapters, and the results were evaluated. The percentage of rejected keywords is below 5%. The ratio between existing and newly added keywords: 81% of the keywords were newly added. Result: A large number of document descriptions in the OAPEN Library has been enriched and the procedure for automatically selecting the entities is now available. To run an experiment is to learn and we have learned that it is possible – with some human help – to let a computer find out what an open access book is about.