OAPEN

Online library of open access books

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.

OAPEN 2022 Stakeholder Report

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.

Spotlight

OAPEN in 2023

2023 was an eventful year for us at the OAPEN Foundation. We want to thank everyone who contributed to the OAPEN Library or used our services and look forward to continuing supporting our stakeholders and the transition to open access for scholarly books. Read on for a few highlights below.

Spotlight

OAPEN OA Books Toolkit Survey

Over three years after the launch of the OAPEN OA Books Toolkit, we’re planning a round of redesign and enrichment with new, research-based content this year. To do this, we’re reaching out to you, as users of the toolkit. Please help us to redesign by sharing your user experience. The survey will take less than 5 minutes to complete and the deadline for responses is Thursday 29 February. We look forward to your feedback!

Spotlight

OAPEN and Thoth Open Metadata sign partnership agreement

Thoth Open Metadata is a community-led non-profit platform and service facilitating open metadata management and dissemination workflows for Open Access (OA) books and book chapters. With Thoth, publishers can easily create and distribute metadata in a variety of standard formats such as MARC, ONIX, KBART, and JSON, in numerous variants reflecting specific platforms’ requirements. Thoth’s platform and services assist publishers in the creation, management and dissemination of fully open metadata records for their titles, leading to improved, higher-quality metadata that benefits the entire scholarly communication ecosystem. Thoth also supports an integration of the data, which is released with a CC0 licence, with third-party applications through its open APIs, enabling innovative new content and services to be developed.

Spotlight

Kimmo Tuominen becomes the new Chair of the OAPEN Foundation

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.

Blog Post

Re-classifying knowledge: moving from BIC to Thema

As you may have seen in our newsletters, we at OAPEN & DOAB are moving from the BIC classification to the new Thema classification. A little background Why are we doing this? The subjects of the books and chapters in the OAPEN Library and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) are described in...

Blog Post

Barricading an open access website – reflections on the attack on DOAB

As many of you might have noticed, last week the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) website was unavailable for several days. Sadly, the reason for this was not a technical glitch as we first suspected, but an actual attack on DOAB. During the weekend of 21 January, someone decided to flood the Domain...

OAPEN

OA Books Toolkit

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For authors

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.

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