News

At the beginning of this year, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) concluded a service level agreement for the use of the OAPEN Library as a repository for DFG-funded open access books. From Spring 2023 onwards, the library will contain monographs and anthologies funded through the Open Access Publication Funding programme and produced in connection with DFG research funding.

We’re delighted to share with you our OAPEN and DOAB 2023 Stakeholder Report! The report provides details on how both OAPEN and DOAB developed in 2023 as we remained committed to achieving our mission to increase discoverability and trust for OA books, and provide open infrastructure services in support of publishers, research funders, and libraries. Download 2023 Stakeholder Report.

In 2021, for the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and the OAPEN Library we have seen growing interest and uptake amongst the German scholarly community. In no small part, thanks to growing support of the German library community and the addition of new German titles and publishers, a report of which we include below.

As part of the ERC-OAPEN-2019 project, we have developed a new dashboard for all our stakeholders. Here we’re zooming in on the usage of the ERC collection in Asian countries…

We are pleased to share a number of recent initiatives that underline the growing recognition of the value of open access books and of DOAB as a primary resource for discovery and quality assurance.

The OAPEN Foundation is delighted to share the news that it has entered into an agreement with SCOAP³ for Books to provide a set of dedicated services around its open access book collection in Particle Physics.

We’re delighted to share with you our OAPEN and DOAB 2023 Stakeholder Report! The report provides details on how both OAPEN and DOAB developed in 2023 as we remained committed to achieving our mission to increase discoverability and trust for OA books, and provide open infrastructure services in support of publishers, research funders, and libraries.

30 June, 2021 In 2020, the OAPEN Foundation celebrated its 10 year anniversary as an open infrastructure service for open access (OA) books, providing services to publishers, libraries and research funders. The mission of OAPEN to increase discoverability of OA books and to build trust around OA books has been leading us through a challenging year marked by the COVID-19 pandemic.

We are happy to share with you how the OAPEN Foundation has developed in 2021, and how we have continued to work on our mission to increase discoverability and trust for open access (OA) books. Together with our partners, we have continued to operate and develop our open infrastructure services for OA books, providing services to libraries, publishers and research funders. Download the OAPEN 2021 Stakeholder report here

We’re delighted to share with you how the OAPEN Foundation has developed in 2022 as we remained committed to achieving our mission to increase discoverability and trust for open access (OA) books. Alongside our partners, we continued to operate and develop our open infrastructure services for OA books, providing support to libraries, publishers, and research funders.

Thoth Open Metadata is a community-led non-profit platform and service facilitating open metadata management and dissemination workflows for Open Access (OA) books and book chapters. With Thoth, publishers can easily create and distribute metadata in a variety of standard formats such as MARC, ONIX, KBART, and JSON, in numerous variants reflecting specific platforms’ requirements. Thoth’s platform and services assist publishers in the creation, management and dissemination of fully open metadata records for their titles, leading to improved, higher-quality metadata that benefits the entire scholarly communication ecosystem. Thoth also supports an integration of the data, which is released with a CC0 licence, with third-party applications through its open APIs, enabling innovative new content and services to be developed.

The OAPEN Foundation is delighted to announce that it has entered into a partnership collaboration with UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) to provide a set of dedicated services for its funded open access (OA) books.

2022 has been an exciting year full of growth and new developments for the OAPEN Foundation, a few of which we highlight below. But first we want to express our gratitude to everyone who contributed to the OAPEN Library or used our services. We’re looking forward to many more years of cooperation in supporting the worldwide transition to open access for academic books…

2023 was an eventful year for us at the OAPEN Foundation. We want to thank everyone who contributed to the OAPEN Library or used our services and look forward to continuing supporting our stakeholders and the transition to open access for scholarly books. Read on for a few highlights below.

2024 was an incredibly full and rewarding year, and we enjoyed collaborating with organisations across the landscape to promote and support open access (OA) books. We’d love to share a few highlights with you ahead of releasing our annual stakeholder report where we will expand on them (and more!) in detail.

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.

The OAPEN Library has been experiencing a concerning amount of activity from AI bots, which has been increasing in frequency over the last few months and shows no sign of stopping. This activity can cause our service to respond slower than usual, and sometimes time out. We are working closely with our hosting partner, CERN, to resolve the issues and find a long term solution. You can read more about this in our recent blog.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused to our stakeholders and users and thank you for your continued patience with us as we navigate this new challenge and strive to continue to provide you with reliable access to the OAPEN Library collection.

We are happy to see the growing commitment of Springer Nature to open access books as they announce their 1000th OA book title: ‘Health of People, Health of Planet and Our Responsibility: Climate Change, Air Pollution and Health’

CERN and the OAPEN Foundation have completed the migration to directly host the OAPEN Library and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) in the CERN Data Centre.

We are excited to update our collaboration with Firenze University Press (FUP), resulting in an impressive addition to our collection. We have added the complete catalogue of FUP in the OAPEN Library, now including nearly 2,000 open access books and chapters.

DOAB is pleased to announce the appointment of Tom Mosterd as its new Community Manager. In his new role, Tom Mosterd will be working closely with the DOAB community on an open and inclusive future for both the DOAB and OAPEN infrastructures. He will be responsible for communications, campaigns and is the contact point for institutional prospects and customers. His primary focus will be to manage the SCOSS fundraising campaign on behalf of DOAB and OAPEN.

We are grateful to the following libraries and consortia who have either supported us for the first time or continued their long-time support; and to the following libraries who want to make OA books more discoverable and the latest research available around the world by being part of the OAPEN Library and DOAB.

OAPEN has been collecting COUNTER-conformant statistics in co-operation with IRUS-UK, starting in July 2013. Since then, we have passed the milestone of 10 million downloads. At the end of February 2020, the total number of downloads exceeded 10,560,000.

17 June, 2021. Recently, we decided to deprecate the MARC21 feed based on feedback from our users. The same information (the same MARC fields and subfields) is also provided in our MARCXML feed which will remain active. The MARCXML feed complies to all technical standards and this format can be easily converted to other MARC formats in MARCEdit.

23 May, 2021. OPERAS, the European Research Infrastructure for the development of open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities, is holding its first national node event in the Netherlands (OPERAS-NL) on 22nd June from 10:00 - 12:00 (CEST).

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Kimmo Tuominen, Director General of the National Library of Finland (Kansalliskirjasto), succeeds Bas Savenije as Chair of the OAPEN Foundation Supervisory Board. Kimmo has previously held positions as university librarian at Helsinki University Library, director of the Jyväskylä University Library, head of reference and archival services at the Library of Parliament, and director of the Faculty of Arts Library, as well as several other elected positions in Finland and internationally, providing him with a broad range of experience well-suited as Chair of the OAPEN Foundation.

20 May, 2021. The DOAB Foundation and OAPEN Foundation are pleased to announce a new partnership with LYRASIS. Through this partnership, DOAB, OAPEN and LYRASIS will establish a pathway for U.S. institutions to support the continuing development of open infrastructure services for open access (OA) books.

23 March, 2021. Join us for this workshop on 6 different approaches to OA book publishing from various European publishers.

Each presenter will share their OA book publishing experiences and insights with an emphasis on the areas of: Revenue, Costs, Legal Issues & Workflows.

01 January, 2021. Thanks to new pledges of support from Canada, France and the Netherlands we surpassed the halfway point of our SCOSS campaign, currently at 60% of our financial target.

16 December, 2020. Sometimes, new things come in pairs. In our case, the pivot from our legacy system to the DSpace environment coincided with an update of our usage reporting.

25 November, 2020. OAPEN Foundation is delighted to announce that Niels Stern has been appointed as Director of OAPEN Foundation.

Niels will take over from Eelco Ferwerda on the 1st of January, as Eelco will retire at the end of this year.

01 October, 2020. October 2010 marked the launch and official start of the OAPEN platform, take a look at some of our major milestones over the last 10 years via the infographic in this article.

30 September, 2020. A freely available toolkit: helping academic book authors to better understand open access book publishing.

01 September, 2020. Together with OPERAS, ScholarLed and SPARC Europe we will be launching the Open Access Books Network (OABN): a space for passionate conversations about OA Books.