OAPEN Library
Mission
OAPEN promotes and supports the transition to open access for academic books by providing open infrastructure services to stakeholders in scholarly communication.
We work with publishers to build a quality-controlled collection of open access books and provide services for publishers, libraries, and research funders in the areas of hosting, deposit, quality assurance, dissemination, and digital preservation.
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.
Key Achievements
Technical Attributes
Open Code Repository
Maintenance Status
Open Product Roadmap
Content Licensing
Standards Employed
- OpenAIRE
- COUNTER
- ONIX
- MARC
- OAI-PMH
- Dublin Core
Hosting Options & Service Providers
Hosting Strategy
Service Providers
What other tools and projects does your project interact with?
- Webscraping (for instance Google Scholar, Unpaywall, Unglue.it)
- Harvesting (for instance BASE, CORE, OpenAIRE)
- API (for instance OpenBCP, Open Syllabus)
- Metadata feeds (for instance EBSCO, Exlibris/Clarivate, OCLC)
Community Engagement
Community Engagement
Organizational Commitment to Community Engagement
Annual meeting for supporting libraries, sharing our technical roadmap to invite libraries to provide suggestions for new development and to give general feedback.
- Managing a library working group.
- Coordinating a funder forum.
- Serving as Executive Assembly member of OPERAS
- Serving on the Board of Stewards for the Open Book Collective
- Serving the Think.Check.Submit Committee
- Serving on a number of advisory boards and other committees
- Writing articles and blogs and giving 50+ presentations at conferences and webinars annually - see engagement in our annual stakeholder report
Engagement with Values Frameworks
User Contribution Pathways
- Contribute funds
- Contribute to code
- Contribute to working groups or interest groups
Policies & Governance
Governance Summary
The OAPEN Library is an initiative of the OAPEN Foundation. The Foundation is governed by a Supervisory Board and an Advisory Board.
Policies
Web Accessibility Statement
Additional Information
Organizational History
The OAPEN Library 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 build a platform for peer-reviewed open access academic books and to explore publication and business models for open book publishing. After the close of the project, OAPEN continued its activities as a not-for-profit and independent foundation (a Stichting - cannot be sold or acquired by law).
Read the story of OAPEN here: https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.3303
Organizational Structure
Business or Ownership Model
Full-time Staff
Funding
Primary Funding Source
Funding Needs
As an infrastructure for open research published as peer-reviewed books (monographs, edited collections etc.) OAPEN primary role is to ensure smooth distribution of books from publishers to readers, most often through academic libraries. Maintaining and developing this core part of the infrastructure to accommodate the needs of publishers and libraries is an increasingly more challenging task as more and more books are sent to the OAPEN Library and the demands among institutions increase. Furthermore, as research funders develop OA book policies OAPEN's service provision to the funders also needs developing.
In short, funding will help the maintenance of existing and the development of new open services as required by libraries and funders, enabling seamless access to thousands of scholarly books for millions of readers worldwide. Additionally, funding will enable OAPEN to pursue equity for publishers worldwide by providing global distribution services to any publisher who fullfills the basic requirements of peer review and open access. OAPEN is proactively reaching out to publishers in all regions of the world to make them aware of these possibilities.