OAPEN in 2024

2024 was an incredibly full and rewarding year, and we enjoyed collaborating with organisations across the landscape to promote and support open access (OA) books. We’d love to share a few highlights with you ahead of releasing our annual stakeholder report where we will expand on them (and more!) in detail.

We’re delighted to share that over the course of 2024, the OAPEN Library collection grew by over 7,700 publications and saw over 18 million downloads.

In March, we announced our new collaboration with CERN to host the OAPEN Library and Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) in its Data Center. We welcomed three new team members into the fold: Mary Felix-Maina (General Manager), Vaggelis Theodorakopoulos (Platform Engineer), and Sebastiano Sali (Community Manager). We met in August for our annual team days in Leiden to connect and discuss our 2025-2028 strategy.

On 30 September, four years after its initial launch, we relaunched the OAPEN OA Books Toolkit, in cooperation with the PALOMERA project. We continued working on PALOMERA throughout the year, culminating in a final conference in Ljubljana where the project’s recommendations were presented alongside other key results like the PALOMERA Knowledge Base.

In December, we entered a new partnership with UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) to provide a set of dedicated services for OA books funded by UKRI.

Thank you to everyone who engaged with and supported us in 2024. We look forward to continuing collaborating with our stakeholders on the transition to open access for academic books in 2025.