Strengthening open infrastructures for scholarly books
CERN and the OAPEN Foundation have completed the migration to directly host the OAPEN Library and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) in the CERN Data Centre.
The Hague, The Netherlands. 27 January, 2025
Image credit: CERN
CERN and the OAPEN Foundation are pleased to announce the successful completion of their expanded partnership to promote open access to books. As of January 2025, CERN’s Data Centre is now directly hosting both the OAPEN Library and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), alongside its other scholarly communication services such as INSPIREhep and Zenodo.
This milestone marks a significant step forward in increasing the operational efficiency and reliability of OAPEN and DOAB as vital open access book infrastructure for the global research community. The integration has enhanced stability for OAPEN’s stakeholders worldwide, providing open access to over 40,000 books hosted in the OAPEN Library, seeing some 1.5M COUNTER downloads per month.
“CERN is delighted to enhance our existing partnership with the OAPEN Library to provide a stable, robust, and efficient experience for readers all around the world”, says Kamran Naim, Head of Open Science at CERN. “The hosting of the SCOAP3 for Books initiative demonstrated the immense potential of OAPEN, resulting in a manifold increase in the global reach and readership of high energy physics titles included in its SCOAP3 collection. We are thrilled to support this key piece of scholarly infrastructure to support the needs of researchers, students, teachers, and curious readers worldwide and across disciplines!”
“Our expanded partnership builds upon our organizations’ shared commitment to open research and a successful collaboration since 2021 through the SCOAP3 for Books initiative,” says Niels Stern, Managing Director of OAPEN. “The completion of the migration reinforces both CERN’s and OAPEN’s positions as partners in the global transition to open science, aligning with their core missions. Furthermore, it significantly strengthens the technical resilience, reliability, and capabilities of OAPEN and DOAB to the benefit of all those using and depending on our services: libraries, publishers, funders, and readers across the globe.”
About CERN CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the world’s largest scientific research organization. Located near Geneva, Switzerland, it operates the largest particle physics laboratory, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). CERN’s mission is to explore the fundamental nature of matter and the universe through cutting-edge experiments. It fosters international collaboration among scientists from diverse disciplines.The organization also contributes significantly to advancements in technology, computing, and innovation. CERN is committed to the advancement of science and the wide dissemination of knowledge by embracing and promoting practices making scientific research more open, collaborative, and responsive to societal changes. CERN accordingly recognizes the holistic practice of open science as one of its guiding principles
About OAPEN & DOAB The OAPEN Foundation is an independent, not-for-profit organisation dedicated to peer-reviewed open access books. OAPEN operates three platforms: the OAPEN Library, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB, in partnership with OpenEdition), and the OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit. OAPEN promotes and supports the global transition to open access for academic books by providing open infrastructure services to stakeholders in scholarly communication.
The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) is a globally used, community-driven and open directory that indexes high quality peer-reviewed open access books. The primary mission of DOAB is to increase discoverability of open access books and increase trust in open access book publishing. All DOAB services are free of charge and all data is freely available.