Services

OAPEN works with publishers to build a quality controlled collection of open access books and provides services for publishers, libraries, and research funders in the areas of dissemination, quality assurance, and digital preservation.

OAPEN operates three platforms, the OAPEN Library, the OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit and - in partnership with OpenEdition - the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB).

The OAPEN Library is set up to host and disseminate OA books. Usage of the collection is reported following COUNTER-conformant usage statistics.

Deposit Service

We support OA mandates from funders and enable researchers and publishers to deposit publications that are covered by mandates.

The OAPEN Deposit Service supports open access policies of research funders and practitioners (research institutions, universities and their libraries). The Deposit Service provides an institutional uploading service for researchers and publishers and is adapted to the specific demands for academic books, making use of the existing metadata standards, classification schemes, and distribution channels for academic books.

Depending on the needs of institutions, the Deposit Service can consist of the following elements:

  • providing guidance and support to researchers and to publishers to comply with OA guidelines and requirements

  • aggregation and deposit of OA monographs and monograph chapters in the OAPEN Library

  • quality assurance of publications

  • hosting and full text retrieval

  • dissemination and digital preservation

  • usage reporting, grant reporting and compliance monitoring

Dissemination

We provide freely available metadata feeds in various formats and work with intermediaries to optimise dissemination of the collection.

  • OAPEN provides daily metadata feeds in various formats (ONIX 3.0, MARCXML, CSV) for libraries and their service providers.
  • OAPEN works with the main library suppliers, such as ProQuest (Serial Solutions), ExLibris (Primo Central) and EBSCO Discovery Service. The publications are integrated in WorldCat (OCLC) and BASE; OAPEN acts as aggregator for Europeana.
  • Libraries and aggregators can also harvest the metadata using the OAI harvesting protocol.
  • OAPEN.org is optimised for search engines (using the site map) and is indexed by Google Scholar.

How our metadata is used

Digital preservation

We work with partners to provide a stable repository infrastructure and digital preservation service.

  • The OAPEN Library is built on the DSpace infrastructure, hosted by CERN. Using open source software helps to ensure a stable environment for the OAPEN collection.
  • OAPEN collaborates with Portico and CLOCKSS for digital preservation.

Discovery

We improve discovery in collaboration with DOAB.

In addition to the OAPEN Library, OAPEN also manages a dedicated discovery service for open access books in partnership with OpenEdition: the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB). DOAB contains the metadata of open access books, uploaded by publishers. Books in the OAPEN Library are automatically listed in DOAB, provided they have an open content licence (such as a CC licence).

Reporting

We provide the OAPEN dashboard, based on the COUNTER standard.

The goal of the OAPEN dashboard is to provide COUNTER conformant usage statistics to publishers, funders and libraries. Each of these organisation types has different needs, and the dashboard reflects that. Once the dashboard has been set up for your organisation, it allows the members of your organisation to continuously check and download your usage data. The data is automatically updated monthly. The dashboard has been secured and each organisation receives only one user name and password.

All data is COUNTER conformant and is based on Release 5 of the COUNTER Code of Practice. This provides you with comparable, authoritative, standards-based data. The metric used is Total_Item_Requests.; it counts the total number of views of a full content item, e.g. downloading a PDF.

The usage data is provided by IRUS-UK. As part of the COUNTER processing, IRUS filters out usage by known robots using both the COUNTER robots list and an additional IRUS robots list. Requests to download an item where the mouse is clicked twice within thirty seconds are designated as “double clicks” and only counted as one request.

Learn more in this short OAPEN dashboard demo video.

In addition to the OAPEN dashboard, book analytics are also displayed on each item page using the OPERAS Metrics widget. The two tools provide information on different metrics: the OAPEN Library dashboard counts total item requests, and the OPERAS Metrics widget counts unique item requests. Learn more about the COUNTER standard for counting the use of electronic resources.