The OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation based in the Netherlands, with its registered office at the National Library in The Hague. OAPEN’s mission is to increase discoverability of open access (OA) books and to promote and build trust in OA book publishing.

OAPEN operates three platforms, the OAPEN Library, the OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit and - in partnership with OpenEdition - the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB):

• The OAPEN Library is set up to host and disseminate OA books. Usage of the collection is reported following COUNTER-conformant usage statistics.
• The OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit is a free-to-access information resource that helps book authors to better understand open access book publishing and increase trust in OA books.
• The DOAB is a discovery service indexing OA books from publishers worldwide. All DOAB services are free of charge and all data is freely available

Please see DOAB & OAPEN's Membership Offer Information, for more details of its offering to Supporting Institutions. 

OAPEN website: oapen.org

DOAB website: doabooks.org

Mission and Values

OAPEN’s mission is to increase discoverability of open access (OA) books and to promote and build trust in OA book publishing. We deliver on our mission by providing a fully open infrastructure for scholarly books offering services in the areas of hosting, distribution, monitoring and preservation. As such we help publishers making their books discoverable and available to academic libraries, web services, and readers in general in many ways. The OAPEN Library runs on DSpace 6.0 which is an open-source repository system. All metadata are fully open and freely available as is our REST API. We don’t charge anyone for using the OAPEN Library and we don’t require any form of registration.

Governance

OAPEN and DOAB are both independent Dutch foundations (‘Stichting’) that cannot be sold or acquired. The two foundations are operated by the OAPEN Foundation team but they are governed independently of each other although clearly connected.

OAPEN Foundation

OAPEN was developed as a 30-month targeted project co-funded by the EU in its eContentplus-program (2008-2010). After the close of the project, it continued its activities as a foundation. OAPEN is currently in the process of changing its governance structure. Its current Board of Directors will be changed to a Supervisory Board which is a change that is happening within the existing framework of being a not-for-profit Dutch Foundation. As part of this change the Board of Directors have agreed to set up an Advisory Board. The role of the Advisory Board is to provide the Board of Directors (to become the Supervisory Board in 2023) with solicited and unsolicited advice on the business matters of OAPEN. The Advisory Board also has the right to render a binding nomination for one member of the OAPEN Board of Directors (to become the Supervisory Board in 2023).

The Advisory Board comprises members from different stakeholder groups and geographical regions and can be found on our website here.

DOAB Foundation

The DOAB Foundation is steered by an Executive Board (Pierre Mounier and Niels Stern) and governed by a Supervisory Board with two members representing OAPEN, two members representing OpenEdition (owned by CNRS and Aix-Marseille University), and one neutral chair (currently Neil Jacobs, UKRN).

DOAB is further advised by a Scientific Committee (SC). The SC consists of members with experience or knowledge in SSH scholarship and the editorial side of monograph publishing. SC members have a diverse background, representing different publishing cultures and disciplines. The SC is an independent body, to be consulted in scientific matters. Its members cannot have other roles within DOAB. SC members are appointed for a period of 4 years and can be reappointed for new terms. Members of the Executive Board and the Supervisory Board cannot be members of the Scientific Committee. Decisions are made by consensus and, if consensus cannot be reached, by majority vote. The chair has been appointed by the members of the SC. The chair of the SC acts as advisor to the Executive Board. Members of the SC can be found here.

Future Plans

The OAPEN and DOAB infrastructures are constantly being developed. Based on feedback from the library community, for instance as a result of our annual meeting for supporting libraries and our library working group. Current developments include:

• Further development of the collections, and increasing coverage of open access books and publishers from around the globe

• Customized feeds of selected parts of the OAPEN Library (based on subject, language etc.)

• Further development of usage dashboard.

• Metadata quality enhancement, e.g. the NAG standard (MARCXML: comply with ‘Metadata Profiles: MARC21 Records for Print & Electronic Books’).

• Enhancement of the integration with Library System Provider Knowledgebases.

• Integration of the OAPEN Library within the EBSCO GOBI collection.

• Development of a privacy-friendly Recommender system.

• Inclusion of OAPEN Library in open third part projects like the Palace project and Zendy.Implementation of the DOAB ‘Peer Review Information Service for Monographs’ (PRISM) which is a standardised way for academic publishers to display information about their peer review processes adding transparency about the peer review process(es), to help build trust in open access academic book publishing.

• Further enhancement of the OAPEN OA Books Toolkit, a public information resource on OA book publishing.

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