Description of the Peer Review process per partner

The OAPEN Library is a collection of quality-assured content. To ensure a standard level of academic quality OAPEN applies the following procedure for its participating publishers.

OAPEN screens publishers who wish to join the library and provide Open Access publications to the collection. Publishers or publishing entities (usually research institutes with their own publishing program) need to be predominantly academic publishers, which primarily means they should have proper and transparent procedures for peer review of manuscripts and it should be clear which publications are peer reviewed.

OAPEN requires publishers to describe their peer review procedures and make these descriptions available for publication on the OAPEN website. The aim of transparency in peer review procedures is to ensure and promote academic standards. All publishers benefit from this quality assurance in the long run.

In the case of book publishing the procedures for peer review tend to vary across borders and publishing traditions. OAPEN does not rank these different procedures, but we do have minimum requirements. Reviewing should be conducted by independent peers and/or editorial boards, and editors (including series editors) should not act as reviewers.