About us

The OAPEN Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation based in the Netherlands, with its registered office at the National Library in The Hague. OAPEN is dedicated to open access, peer-reviewed books.

OAPEN operates three platforms:

OAPEN Library - a central repository for hosting and disseminating OA books
OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit - a toolkit on OA book publishing for authors
Directory of Open Access Books - a discovery service indexing OA books, in partnership with OpenEdition

OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) was developed as a 30-month targeted project co-funded by the EU in its eContentplus-program (2008-2010). The goal of the project was to achieve a sustainable publication model for academic books in humanities and social sciences and to improve the visibility and usability of high quality academic research in Europe. After the close of the project, OAPEN continued its activities as a foundation.

OAPEN Foundation was established by the University of Amsterdam (UvA), the University of Leiden (UL), the University library of Utrecht University (UU), the Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW), the National Library of the Netherlands (KB) and Amsterdam University Press (AUP).

Projects

OAPEN is involved in various initiatives for open access books:

Open Access Books Network (OABN) - OAPEN is one of the coordinators supporting the OABN - a space for passionate conversations about open access books, creating an online community around open access books.
Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) - OAPEN participates in the COPIM partnership, building community-owned, open systems and infrastructures to enable open access book publishing to flourish.
Open Access eBook Usage (OAeBU) Data Trust pilot project - OAPEN serves on the Advisory Board for the (OAeBU) Data Trust pilot project. Participating in the development and testing of infrastructure, policy and governance models to support a diverse, global data trust for usage data on open access monographs.
SCELC & OAPEN Pilot Project - SCELC and OAPEN collaborate through this pilot project in an effort to amplify the usage of open access (OA) resources in SCELC member libraries.
OA Book Usage Analytics for Diverse Communities – A Demonstration Project - As one of the four partner organisations, OAPEN participates in The Book Analytics Dashboard Project focused on creating a sustainable OA Book focused analytics service.

Mission

OAPEN’s goals are:

to build a branded collection of open access peer-reviewed titles;
to increase the visibility and retrievability of high-quality publications;
to promote open access book publishing.

Board

The Board of Directors consists of the following members:

Bas Savenije (chair)
Kurt De Belder (secretary) – Leiden University
Reinier Groen (treasurer)
Lidia Borrell-Damián - Science Europe
Charles Watkinson - University of Michigan
Antia Wiersma – Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences

OAPEN Advisory Board

In 2021 the Board of Directors agreed to set up an Advisory Board. The role of the Advisory Board is to provide the Board of Directors with solicited and unsolicited advice on the business matters of OAPEN. The Advisory Board also has the right to render a binding nomination for one member of the OAPEN Board of Directors.

The Advisory Board comprises members from different stakeholder groups and geographical regions. The members are:

Dirk Pieper, Deputy Director, Bielefeld University Library
Natalia Grygierczyk, Director, Radboud University Press
Claire Redhead, Director, OASPA
Regula Graf, Scientific Officer, Swiss National Science Foundation
Wendy Queen, Director, Project MUSE
Marin Dacos, National Open Science Coordinator, French Ministry of Science
Carsten Buhr, Managing Director, De Gruyter
Agnès Ponsati, Director, CSIC - Unit of Information Resources for Research, Director (Spanish National Research Council)
Cameron Neylon, Professor of Research Communications, Curtin University, Co-lead COKI

Annual Reports

Introduction

In 2011 the OAPEN Foundation was founded as an open infrastructure service for open access (OA) books providing services to publishers, libraries, and research funders in the areas of hosting, deposit, quality assurance, dissemination, and digital preservation. Since then, the progress of the OAPEN Foundation has been documented in annual reports.