OAPEN OA Books Toolkit Relaunch - Press Release
The Hague, 30th of September 2024 - On the day that marked its fourth anniversary, OAPEN Foundation has relaunched an improved and enriched version of its Open Access (OA) Books Toolkit as part of the EU-funded PALOMERA project.
“I would like to thank all the PALOMERA project partners that worked with us to improve the toolkit” - says Niels Stern, Managing Director of the OAPEN Foundation and Scientific Coordinator of the PALOMERA project - “Their engagement and hard work made it possible to improve what was already a very successful tool in the scholarly books community”.
As of the 30th of September 2024, the updated and rebranded OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit will be online and users will be able to enjoy the new content, functionality and revamped design. During the month of October, the social media campaign #OAbookstoolkit will highlight some of the most prominent new features, encouraging researchers, librarians, and policymakers to engage with it, especially during the Open Access Week (21-27 October).
Finally, the renewed toolkit will be presented, live via online streaming and in person, at the final conference of the PALOMERA project, in Ljubljana, Slovenia, on the 28th October, at the presence of some 100 attendees, amongst project partners, funding institutions, policymakers, and research performing organisations.
The idea for the Open Access Books Toolkit originated from a workshop session organised by Springer Nature and the University of Glasgow as part of the Researcher to Reader Conference in 2019. From there on, it was further developed through a series of workshops for authors hosted at the universities of Oxford, Glasgow and Utrecht in collaboration with OAPEN and Springer Nature. Finally, the first version of the toolkit was launched on the 30th of September 2020.
The Toolkit was later redeveloped as part of PALOMERA, a project to improve policy alignment for open access to academic books in the European Research Area (ERA).
“We aimed at updating some of the existing content, like the landscape of policy and funding for open access books” - adds Dr Mikael Laakso, Professor of Information Studies at Tampere University, Finland and lead for the Toolkit project work package - “we have aimed to produce content that is useful for actors at any stage of OA policy development, emphasising an iterative lifecycle view of the process”.
The OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit aims at promoting and supporting open access to academic books. It consists of short articles covering a wide range of topics relating to OA books, each including a list of sources referenced, further reading and links to definitions of key terms.
The Toolkit has two main sections. One section is for researchers as authors of academic books and it helps them to better understand open access book publishing and to increase trust in open access books. The second section looks at funding and policies for OA books and provides a resource to support policy development for OA books. Thanks to the policy overview stemming from the Knowledge Base, the Toolkit is a unique and comprehensive resource that helps publishers and authors navigate the landscape of research funders and institutions policy.
The OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit is steered by an editorial advisory board representing the research community, publishers, open access organisations, funders, and research support staff at universities. This resource strives to be a reliable, credible, and stakeholder-agnostic resource for users worldwide. To enable continuous updates and credibility, the Toolkit is operated by OAPEN.
About the OAPEN Foundation
The OAPEN Foundation is an independent, 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
Contact person
Sebastiano Sali, Community Manager at OAPEN Foundation s.sali @ oapen.org