Services for publishers

OAPEN partners with academic publishers to build and curate a high-quality, peer-reviewed collection of open access (OA) books. Our services are tailored to support every kind of publisher throughout the whole post-publication lifecycle, from hosting and deposit to metadata, dissemination, and digital preservation, ensuring your OA books reach the widest possible audience.

Hosting

OAPEN provides a reliable and flexible hosting service for your peer-reviewed OA books, ensuring that your titles are disseminated, preserved, and easily integrated into global discovery systems. Our infrastructure is designed to accommodate a variety of workflows, while reducing technical and administrative burdens, making it simple for publishers to deposit and manage their content.

We offer multiple options for uploading titles to the OAPEN Library, including:

  • OAI-PMH harvesting
  • FTP bulk upload
  • Manual web submission

We also support third-party delivery from platforms such as: Bibliovault, Ingram/CoreSource, and CodeMantra.

For publishers working with authors funded by organisations with open access requirements, OAPEN funder services provide additional support. See our services for funders page for more details.

Dissemination

OAPEN ensures your books are widely visible and accessible through numerous avenues, making it easy for your titles to be integrated into library systems and discovery platforms.

  • Our metadata is freely available and distributed in a wide range of formats including: ONIX 3.0, MARCXML, CSV, JSON, KBART, HTML, and RSS. Explore our metadata formats.
  • We collaborate with major library service providers including ProQuest (Serials Solutions), Ex Libris (Primo Central), and EBSCO Discovery Service to increase dissemination of your OA books to libraries globally.
  • Our collection is integrated into global platforms like WorldCat (OCLC), BASE, and Europeana.
  • Our site is optimised for search engines, indexed by Google Scholar, and supports OAI-PMH harvesting for easy metadata retrieval.
  • We’re an OpenAIRE-compliant repository.
  • We follow metadata best practices and enhance records with persistent identifiers for documents (DOI), authors (ORCID), and funders (FundRef) to make them more discoverable.
  • We also offer services to assist publishers with metadata enhancement, document uploads, and conversion to the Thema classification scheme.
  • Through close collaboration with the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), your OA books hosted in the OAPEN Library are automatically indexed in the directory, increasing discoverability.

Preservation

OAPEN is committed to ensuring the long-term accessibility and preservation of OA books for publishers, demonstrated as follows:

  • The OAPEN Library is built on the robust, open-source DSpace infrastructure.
  • Our servers are hosted by CERN, providing a stable and trusted foundation for managing our collection.
  • We partner with trusted preservation services Portico and CLOCKSS, ensuring that all content remains securely archived and accessible over time.

Usage statistics and analytics tools

The OAPEN Library Dashboard

OAPEN offers a dedicated usage dashboard, designed to deliver COUNTER-conformant usage statistics for the OAPEN Library. The dashboard enables publishers to monitor and download usage data for their organisation.

Each dashboard is specific to the publisher and is securely accessed via a unique login. Usage data is updated monthly and reflects the COUNTER Code of Practice Release 5, ensuring that statistics are standardised, authoritative, and directly comparable across platforms. The primary metric reported is ‘Total_Item_Requests’ which counts full content views (e.g. PDF downloads).

To maintain accuracy, IRUS filters out known automated activity using both the COUNTER and IRUS robot lists. Duplicate clicks such as multiple download attempts within 30 seconds are consolidated into a single request.

Preview the dashboard in this short demo video.

OPERAS Metrics

In addition to the dashboard, item-level usage analytics are available via the OPERAS Metrics widget displayed on each book webpage. While the dashboard reports on total item requests, OPERAS Metrics provides data on unique item requests, offering a complementary perspective on how your content is being accessed.

Together, these tools give publishers a fuller picture of engagement with their OA books hosted in the OAPEN Library.

Contact

Interested in hosting your books in the OAPEN Library? Apply now or contact us to find out more.