This year marks the 15th anniversary of the OAPEN Library, which was launched at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2010. At this year’s fair, we invite you to attend our half hour panel discussion on ‘The Evolution of Open Access Books’ to celebrate the occasion. It’s happening on Thursday, 16 October from 12:00 to 12:30 CEST at the Innovation Stage (Hall 4.0, H106).
An anniversary like this provides an excellent moment to reflect on the past, present, and future. Two years ago, I co-wrote the article ‘Open Access to Books – the Perspective of a Non-profit Infrastructure Provider’ (Journal of Electronic Publishing, 2023, https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.3303) that covered the history of OAPEN quite well. A couple of years prior to that, I shared a more personal account of the origins of OAPEN in ‘A brief saga about open access books’ (Nordic Perspectives on Open Science, 2021, https://doi.org/10.7557/11.5751).
So, in this blog post I will shift focus from the past to where we are today and where we’re heading at OAPEN.
A good place to begin is our Strategic Plan 2025-2028. Released at the beginning of this year, the plan is the result of a thorough process involving our team, as well as our Supervisory and Advisory Boards. It sets a clear direction for the future and is defined by six strategic goals. It’s the implementation of the goals, however, that makes the difference. Our team has been working hard to materialise the strategy through concrete action.
I know that walking through a strategic plan can be quite tedious, so I will keep it brief and share some highlights to give you a general idea of how we are steering OAPEN in times of rapid change.
Our key stakeholders are libraries, publishers, and funders. Everything we do – and should do – is to address their needs. In this way, we can best serve the research community and thereby also the researchers. We are committed to ensuring that our existing services are available and reliable, that we are able to develop new services, and build capacity for our stakeholders. A central prerogative is to promote and ensure high quality standards, improve the user experience of OAPEN, explore and implement AI where relevant. We also want to build strong partnerships, support equity in the global distribution of open access (OA) books and professionalise our organisation.
Here’s what we’ve been doing recently to achieve all the objectives:
- We have established a partnership with CERN and migrated our DSpace servers to the CERN Data Centre. This reinforces the reliability and robustness of our services.
- We have commissioned a full technical review of our infrastructures, performed by the Curtin University Institute for Data Science. This review replicated and documented our code base and provided us with an extensive report including a set of recommendations for future developments. The review considered feedback from several partners provided via thorough interviews. Based on stakeholder and partner feedback, we have solidified our backend and defined a technical roadmap based on user needs.
- We have revisited and elaborated our evaluation criteria for the inclusion of book publishers and further professionalised our evaluation processes – described in this blog post.
- We have updated our visual identity and redesigned our website – read more here.
- We have engaged in a partnership with the Humanities Cluster at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in establishing the Dutch national node for OPERAS.
- We have established and renewed funder collection agreements and workflows with FWF, SNSF, NWO, UKRI, DFG, European Commission, SCOAP3, and Wellcome.
- We have partnered with Science Europe and cOAlition S to establish a Policy Forum on OA Books building in the PALOMERA project Funder Forum.
- We co-coordinated the PALOMERA project, which included 16 partners from across Europe, delivering research data, analysis findings, and recommendations for OA book policies. We also developed a Knowledge Base of OA policies and related documents, and we furthermore expanded the OA Books Toolkit with a policy and funding section.
- We founded and coordinated the OPERAS OA Books Special Interest Group, consisting of three working groups (OABN, Business Models, and Open Infrastructures).
- We have started conversations with several partners about the ethical use of AI, with a focus on respecting the licensing terms of the works we host.
- We have joined the newly established OPERAS AI Special Interest Group.
- We have expanded our engagement within the SCOSS Family and the IOI Infra Finder.
- We have set up an Ambassador Programme to promote the values of OA in scholarly publishing globally.
- We have presented at multiple conferences and webinars to advocate for open and equitable scholarly book publishing.
- We have been deeply engaged in international projects focused on strengthening openness, diversity, equity, and inclusion across scholarly disciplines and publishing practices in Europe, but also in other parts of the world, most recently in Latin America and Africa.
- We have professionalised the organisation by introducing HR policies and support functions, a Jira ticketing system, CRM, and invoicing systems, and external annual financial audit controls.
- We have expanded our team with exceptionally friendly, engaged, and skilled colleagues representing eight different nationalities.
Many of these activities are ongoing and keep us all very busy. Constantly improving and fine-tuning our workflows and services requires a lot of effort. Additionally, new activities are in the pipeline, for example – based on the Curtin recommendations – the development of automated workflows for importing OA books into the OAPEN Library and upgrading the DSpace software to the next version. We also want to expand our engagement in the Middle East and Asia while maintaining strong connections to our existing community of libraries and publishers.
All our services and work invested in them are only made possible through the generous financial support of more than 350 libraries around the world. We are extremely grateful to all those who support us and we invite other libraries to consider doing the same – more info here. Even if financial isn’t possible, there are other important ways to contribute. We encourage libraries to advocate for OA books whenever possible and integrate the OAPEN Library collection of over 40,000 peer-reviewed OA books into their library catalogues, making them immediately available to their patrons. It’s free of charge and there are multiple ways of doing it – see here.
We also want to thank the hundreds of publishers who trust us to host their books. Without your content there would be no OAPEN Library. If you are a publisher considering joining OAPEN, here’s the info you need to know.
We also want to extend our gratitude to the research funders we work with. We are immensely grateful for our collaboration and invite other research funding organisations to explore our collection services or consider becoming part of the Policy Forum on OA Books.
We are fortunate to be part of a vibrant, amicable, and fast-developing community. Good colleagues are foundational to bringing progress and joy to work. This, alongside a strong drive to fulfil our mission and vision, is what personally helps me get up in the morning.
Since beginning my career in scholarly book publishing in 2003, I have strived to ensure that high quality research published in book form can reach their audiences as far and wide as possible. Open access is the most effective means to ensure this, which is why the work we do at OAPEN is truly meaningful to me.
Scholarly books that have undergone rigorous peer review and meticulous editorial work deserve to be available not only to scholars and students but also to readers across the globe. When I worked in publishing, I was always fascinated by the interest in research books by audiences far beyond academia. These books often open doors to new perspectives on well-known topics as well as insights into hidden or overlooked parts of humanity and the society we live in.
Books carry weight and trust. In an increasingly polarised and fragmented society contaminated by misinformation and post-truth claims, scholarly books play a vital role. At a few recent conferences – including at the Open Science Fair 2025 and the UN Science Summit 2025 – I have addressed the work we do to promote and ensure trust in OA book publishing.
Reflecting on the article “The Aspasia Project: Protecting and Repairing the Infrastructure of the Public Debate” by my good friend and colleague Pierre Mounier, I believe our work contributes to a larger effort of restoring the public knowledge infrastructure. Pierre underscores that this restoration is urgently needed to protect our liberal democracies from ruthless autocrats who want to dominate the world. In this sense, I feel that we – as part of a larger community – are part of an extremely important and existential mission to uphold our values and our way of life and build a better future for the next generations.
I truly look forward to the next 15 years and to continuing this journey with our fantastic team to fulfil our mission in collaboration with libraries, publishers, funders, and our brilliant community partners across the world.