The OAPEN Foundation - 2022 in review

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.

The OAPEN Team

In 2022, we welcomed two new colleagues to the OAPEN team, Laura J. Wilkinson and Laura Bandura-Morgan. Laura J. Wilkinson joined OAPEN as a Project Manager. Her previous experience includes roles at Crossref, ORCID, UKSG Committee, and at the university libraries of Northumbria, Sunderland, and Oxford. Laura Bandura-Morgan joined OAPEN as Funder Relations Manager. Laura received her Ph.D in Molecular Biology but for the last 8 years she has been involved in Open Science activities. She was a long-term employee of the National Science Centre, a governmental funding agency in Poland.

Downloads & numbers

A few highlights and interesting facts (numbers for January – November 2022):

  • In 2022, we added approx. 7200 titles: 5700 books and 1500 chapters. The publications were written in Bashkir, Croatian, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, and Spanish. The total number of titles in the OAPEN Library now exceeds 26,000.
  • The OAPEN Library served 11.4 million downloads (approx. 1 million per month).
  • USA, Germany: both countries more than 1 million downloads.

ERC project finalised

In 2022 OAPEN successfully completed the ERC-OAPEN-2019 project. This was the third 2-year project in collaboration with the European Research Council, resulting in a collection of 491 publications in the OAPEN Library. In the first project, the Deposit service for researchers was introduced, which will still be available for future deposits of publications stemming from ERC-funded research.

New projects: BAD, PALOMERA & OPERAS-PLUS

Next to finishing the ERC project, we are also pleased to announce three new projects in which we will be participating:

Book Analytics Dashboard (BAD) project

The Book Analytics Dashboard (BAD) project (formal title: OA Book Usage Analytics for Diverse Communities – A Demonstration Project), is a Mellon funded project (2022-2025) focused on creating a sustainable OA Book analytics service for aggregated usage across platforms. OAPEN participates in this project with fellow PIs from Curtin University in Australia (Professor Lucy Montgomery (Lead PI) and Professor Cameron Neylon) and with Katherine Skinner Cuda (U.S.).

PALOMERA

In January 2023 OAPEN together with fifteen European partners will kick-off the 24-month Horizon Europe funded PALOMERA project (Policy Alignment for Open access Monographs in the European Research Area). PALOMERA will collect, structure, analyse, and make available knowledge that can explain the challenges and bottlenecks that prevent OA to academic books. Based on this evidence PALOMERA will provide actionable recommendations and concrete resources to support and coordinate aligned funder and institutional policies for OA books, with the overall objective of speeding up the transition to open access for books to further promote open science.

OPERAS PLUS

OPERAS is the Research Infrastructure dedicated to support open scholarly communication for the Social Sciences and the Humanities in the European Research Area (ERA). The 3-year OPERAS-PLUS project started on September 1, 2022. The project aims to support OPERAS and the development of the infrastructure in its preparatory phase and on its way towards implementation as an ERIC (European Research Infrastructure Consortium). OAPEN is represented in the Executive Assembly of OPERAS as one of the ten core members and also acts as the OPERAS national node in the Netherlands.