Open Science is central to European research policy. The European Union (EU) has a strong mandate for open access (OA) to scientific information, including support for OA books and chapters.
With about six months remaining in the two-year OAPEN-EU project, funded by the EU under grant 101250595, we’re sharing our progress so far and how we’re planning to spend the remaining time.
What is OAPEN-EU?
OAPEN-EU (Strengthening the OAPEN infrastructure in support of EU Open Access policy) began in May 2025. Its main goal is to create and maintain a dedicated collection of OA books and chapters funded through Horizon Europe, Horizon 2020, and FP7 framework programmes (including ERC funded books) in the OAPEN Library.
The project’s objectives are:
- To support researchers who are authors of books funded via the Horizon Europe work programmes being compliant with the open access requirements of the European Commission and the European Research Council under Horizon Europe.
- To ensure open and robust infrastructure support for Horizon Europe-funded peer reviewed books.
- To increase and strengthen the dissemination, discoverability, and preservation of Horizon Europe funded books and chapters.
- To further strengthen the OAPEN infrastructure and its engagement with key OA book publishing stakeholders, like publishers, researchers, research funders, and libraries.
Overview of the collection
The EU recommends depositing funded books and chapters in the OAPEN Library to meet OA requirements. This can be done by the author directly or by the publisher on their behalf.
As of the beginning of November 2026, there are around 1,000 items making up the OAPEN EU collection. We thought we’d share what the collection looks like.
Out of 1,000 items, 64.9% are books compared to 35.1% that are chapters, as demonstrated in Figure 1.
The publishers with the most records included in the collection are depicted in Figure 2. In total, 92 publishers are represented, which make up 17.42% of all the publishers listed in the OAPEN Library.
The ‘Other’ category includes many University Presses, notably Leuven University Press, Manchester University Press, and UCL Press, as well as smaller presses and publishers from Europe and North America.
Despite the strong focus on multilingualism and bibliodiversity in Horizon Europe funded projects, Figure 3 shows that the dominant language is English. However, there is a large number of records that include two or more languages.
Most records are licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND, as depicted in Figure 4. This again reflects the OAPEN Library collection as a whole and perhaps demonstrates the strong preference for more restrictive Creative Commons licences for OA books in the fields of Humanities and Social Sciences. Other licences in the collection include CC BY, CC BY-NC, and CC BY-NC-SA.
What have we achieved?
Besides the content included in the collection and the technical implications of building it, another big part of the project was to create a usage statistics dashboard that allows the EU to monitor usage of books they’ve funded in the OAPEN Library.
We held a webinar in May 2026, ‘OAPEN-EU: Insights from EU-funded Authors’, in coordination with the Open Access Books Network (OABN) to share more about the project, how authors can submit their manuscripts, and heard from two fantastic EU-funded authors about their experiences publishing an OA book. The recording is available to watch on the OABN YouTube channel.
We also created a short instructional video explaining the criteria for submissions, and how to submit OA books and chapters using our deposit form.
What’s still to come?
Submissions of OA books and chapters that meet the requirements will continue to grow, and this will be reflected in the collection in the OAPEN Library.
A migration is in process to move the OAPEN Library Dashboard from its current third-party hosting environment to hosting in-house. Improvements are planned for 2027.
We’ll share a final update reflecting on the end of the project.
If you have any questions, please contact Laura Bandura-Morgan, Funder Relations Manager.
Learn more about the EU collection.
