Since the OAPEN Library was launched at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2010, our organisation has grown from a bold idea into a global infrastructure pillar for open access (OA) books. Today, more than 40,000 peer-reviewed titles are hosted on our platform, discovered by millions of readers worldwide, trusted by hundreds of publishers and over 300 supporting libraries.
The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) was launched by OAPEN in 2013 and became an independent foundation in 2019, jointly managed by the OAPEN Foundation and OpenEdition. It’s a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed OA books, helping users find trusted OA books and OA book publishers.
But fifteen years of intense, mission-driven growth also means fifteen years of accumulated technical decisions. Some have aged well. Others now require deliberate, strategic modernisation.
In 2025, we took two important steps to prepare for the next fifteen years.
First, we commissioned an independent technical review by the Curtin Institute for Data Science at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. We had previously worked with them on the Book Analytics Dashboard project so they knew our infrastructures fairly well and we know they have strong capabilities with data infrastructures. The report, delivered in July 2025, provided a comprehensive, evidence-based diagnosis of our infrastructure, workflows, and codebase – and a clear set of recommendations.
Second, we strengthened and grew our technology team after Ronald Snijder departed in the summer of 2025. Transitions of this kind are never easy, but they also create opportunities for renewal. In October, Dr Anna Wałek joined as our new Head of Technology, bringing extensive experience in digital library transformation and open science infrastructure. Her appointment marked a turning point: we now have strategic leadership dedicated entirely to our technical roadmap.
We also recruited to fill critical gaps. Vaggelis Theodorakopoulos, our Platform Engineer, and Sinziana Paltineanu, then Project Manager and now one of our three Metadata & Systems Specialists, remained as anchors of continuity. Wiktor Florian joined in December 2025 as Metadata & Systems Specialist, bringing data engineering expertise. Hanna Varachkina joined in January 2026 as Metadata & Systems Specialist, to strengthen our metadata quality and publisher communication from a technical standpoint.
The team is now fully staffed, with clear roles, a shared mandate, and a unified plan.
Today, we are ready to share the result of these efforts: our technical roadmap for 2026.
The foundation: Curtin review and a new team
The Curtin review was never intended to be a document to shelve. It was commissioned as a working instrument, and it has served exactly that purpose. The report confirmed both our strengths – the trust of the community, the richness of our metadata, the dedication of our staff – and the areas where investment is long overdue.
On the infrastructure side, the review highlighted risks associated with running DSpace 6.3 (unsupported since 2023), an outdated Solr version requiring manual management, and a metadata export service that has become increasingly difficult to maintain. Upgrading these core systems is essential not only for security and stability, but also to enable faster search, more accurate discovery results, and better integration with library catalogues and external services – improvements that publishers, librarians, and researchers will directly experience.
On the workflow side, it documented what many publishers have told us directly: manual steps in the deposit process, particularly email notifications after FTP uploads, create unnecessary friction. Metadata updates and withdrawals still require human intervention. The statistics dashboard, while valued, no longer meets the expectations of users who need flexible, timely reporting.
With the Curtin analysis in hand and a complete team in place, we spent the final months of 2025 translating recommendations into concrete projects. The result is our technical roadmap for 2026.
Our 2026 Roadmap: Five strategic priorities
Based on the Curtin recommendations and our own internal audit, we have organised our technical work for 2026 around five core priorities. Each has a clear owner, timeline, and measurable outcomes.
1. Automation of the deposit workflow for OAPEN Library
Publishers depositing books with OAPEN should not have to send an email to confirm an FTP upload. Our new, fully automated pipeline will detect files, validate and transform metadata, check for duplicates, import content into DSpace, and register the book in OAPEN – all without manual intervention. [Pilot expected Q2 2026].
2. Transition from IRUS-UK to OpenAIRE
Over the past years, the OAPEN Dashboard has become an essential tool for many publishers, libraries, and funders collaborating with OAPEN. It provides evidence of impact, supports reporting to funders, and helps demonstrate the global reach of OA books. We know how much our communities rely on it, and we take that responsibility seriously.
IRUS-UK will be retired in April 2026 by Jisc. OAPEN continued sending complete usage data to the service, but this data has not been made available since October 2025 until February 2026. Rather than investing further resources into a decommissioned service, we are accelerating our migration to OpenAIRE. This will provide a COUNTER-compliant, sustainable analytics infrastructure that is more within our control. [Target: Q2 2026].
3. Upgrade of DSpace and Solr
Migrating from DSpace 6.3 to a modern, supported version 10 is a complex operation, but it’s also non-negotiable. Upgrading these core systems is essential not only for security and stability, but also to enable faster search, more accurate discovery results, and better integration with library catalogues and external services – improvements that publishers, librarians, and researchers will directly experience. [Target: Q3 2026].
4. Metadata enrichment and improved discoverability for OAPEN Library and DOAB
Our current metadata schema has been minimal by design. To meet publisher expectations and library requirements, we are expanding ONIX field support, enabling automated metadata updates and withdrawals, and implementing PRISM peer-review metadata. [Q3 2026].
5. Intelligent management of AI bot traffic
The surge in traffic from AI crawlers has repeatedly threatened platform stability (see our blogs from April 2025, May 2025, and November 2025). Together with CERN, we have deployed rate limiting and improved monitoring. We are now working with the broader open infrastructure community to develop shared principles for ethical, sustainable traffic management. [Continuous 2026].
What this means for our community
We know that a roadmap like this – full of upgrades, migrations, and automation – doesn’t look spectacular from the outside. Much of this work happens beneath the surface. It doesn’t appear in search results or dashboard widgets. It won’t make headlines.
But it’s precisely this kind of unglamorous, persistent investment that has kept OAPEN and DOAB running for fifteen years.
Every migration we undertake, every manual process we automate, every line of legacy code we replace – these are not ends in themselves. They are our commitment to you that the infrastructure you rely on today will still be here tomorrow. That the books you publish, fund, and curate will remain discoverable, accessible, and safe.
We are publishing this roadmap because we believe trust is not a given. It is built, daily, through transparency and follow-through. And we believe that the libraries and publishers who support us – financially and otherwise – deserve to see where their investment is going, namely into foundations that will serve them at least the next fifteen years.
Acknowledgements
None of this work would be possible without the trust and support of our community. We thank the Curtin Institute for Data Science for their rigorous and constructive review. We thank CERN for their continued partnership and technical excellence. We thank the funders and 300+ libraries worldwide whose financial contributions sustain our operations. And we thank the hundreds of publishers who entrust us with their content every day.
Fifteen years ago, infrastructures like OAPEN and DOAB were viewed merely as passion projects. Today, they are indispensable parts of the OA book infrastructure ecosystem. The roadmap we have shared today is our commitment to ensuring resilient and trustworthy infrastructures supporting scholarly communication.