Newsletter August 2011

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Contents

1. OAPEN established as Foundation
2. First Open Access books funded through pilots in UK and the Netherlands
3. Connecting the OAPEN Library to your library/catalogue
4. Become part of the OAPEN collection with your content


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1. OAPEN established as Foundation

It is our pleasure to announce that OAPEN is now officially established as a Foundation. The OAPEN foundation will continue its activities to promote and facilitate Open Access book publishing and to aggregate its Open Access collection of peer reviewed books in the OAPEN Library.
The OAPEN foundation is a continuation of the EU co-funded project ‘Open Access Publishing in European Networks’, which was concluded earlier this year with the first OAPEN conference in Berlin. The foundation is established under Dutch law and hosted by the National Library in The Hague.
These are the new contact details:
OAPEN Foundation
Eelco Ferwerda, director
Prins Willem-Alexanderhof 5,
2595 BE The Hague, Netherlands

E-mail:         JLIB_HTML_CLOAKING or JLIB_HTML_CLOAKING
Postal address:     OAPEN Foundation, PO Box 90407, 2509 LK The Hague, Netherlands

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2. First Open Access books funded by pilots in UK and the Netherlands

OAPEN is involved in two pilot projects to publish Open Access books and investigate the effects of OA publishing on usage and sales. OAPEN-UK is managed by JISC Collections and co-funded by the Atrs and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in the UK. OAPEN-NL (www.oapen.nl) is managed by OAPEN in collaboration with SURF Foundation and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and co-funded by NWO. 
In both these pilots, the first books have now been published in Open Access and made available through the OAPEN Library:
* Brill (6 publications)
* Amsterdam University Press (2 publications): http://tinyurl.com/3hwtatb and http://tinyurl.com/3djasqw
* Berg publishers (6 publications)
* Liverpool University Press (4 publications)
* Taylor & Francis (8 publications)
An important goal of OAPEN is to help establish funding opportunities for OA books and OAPEN remains interested to set up similar pilots for Open Access books in other areas. If you’re a publisher or funding organization and interested to get involved, please get in touch with Eelco Ferwerda.

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3. Connecting the OAPEN Library to your library/ catalogue

While the interface of the OAPEN Library contains several functions that go beyond keyword search – enabling serendipity through browsing and searching; multi lingual search and export to both social media and reference managers – the contents of the OAPEN Library can be incorporated into your library or data aggregation feed.

Following our previous newsletter in which we described several available data feeds we received a request for an additional format.  We have now developed a data feed optimised for Excel. Each data feed contains the complete metadata of all books in the library, but in a different technical format. The following data feeds are available:
* ONIX XML – a format widely used in the publishing world;
* CSV – a text format that is usable in most systems;
* MARC XML – this format is optimized for library catalogues;
* XML - optimised for import in Excel.

You can find the feeds here: http://www.oapen.org/xtf/metadataexports

Practical examples of such integrations:
* Union catalogue of the GVK-GBV, one the largest common library network in Germany
* Universiteitsbibliotheek Gent
* James Hardiman Library of the National University of Ireland

Please get in touch with us if you want to enrich your content with the OAPEN collection. The use of the content for this purpose is free of charge.

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4. Become part of the OAPEN Library with your Open Access books

Now that OAPEN is established as a foundation, we are able to renew our relationships with content providers. Scholarly publishers interested in Open Access and with a focus on Humanities and Social Sciences, research institutes with publishing programmes or scholars in charge of a series are invited to join our network and contribute OA publications to the OAPEN Library. By now 23 publishers and research institutes cooperate with us and use OAPEN as means to improve discoverability and dissemination of their Open Access content on a world-wide scale.

If you’re interested to get involved please contact Eelco Ferwerda, director of OAPEN ( JLIB_HTML_CLOAKING ). For technical questions please contact Ronald Snijder ( JLIB_HTML_CLOAKING ).

Contents

1. Closing of project period, Final report

2. OAPEN Foundation and Pilots

3. Connecting the OAPEN Library to your library/ catalogue

4. Become part of the OAPEN collection with your content

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1. Closing of project period, Final report

The funding period of OAPEN as European project has ended in February with the successful conducting of the 1^st OAPEN Conference in Berlin. The final report and the project results were presented to the EC in Luxembourg in April. The final report is available through our website and contains a thorough description of all the results achieved. You can find it here.

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2. OAPEN Foundation and Pilots

In the future OAPEN will continue as an independent foundation governed by representatives of the participating institutions. The objectives for the foundation are to stimulate further OA publishing of academic books, to further develop OAPEN as a platform for OA books and to develop a sustainable business model.

In the meantime, OAPEN is conducting a number of experiments in Open Access book publishing, in the form of pilot projects. The first pilot is conducted in the Netherlands with support from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Ministry of Education (http://www.oapen.nl/). For the UK a similar pilot project is being conducted by JISC Collections (http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/News/OAPENUKITT/).

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3. Connecting the OAPEN Library to your library/ catalogue

You are a university library or an aggregator offering tailored selections of content to your users? The OAPEN collection could be a valuable contribution to your catalogue or database. We are pleased to announce that OAPEN now offers a service to provide aggregators and libraries with the metadata for the OAPEN collection.

The collection is accessible here: http://www.oapen.org

While the interface of the OAPEN Library contains several functions that go beyond keyword search – enabling serendipity through browsing and searching; multi lingual search and export to both social media and reference managers – the contents of the OAPEN Library can be incorporated into other libraries. In order to enable this, several data feeds are available.

Each data feed contains the complete metadata of all books in the library, but in a different technical format. The following data feeds are available:

• ONIX XML – a format widely used in the publishing world;
• CSV – a text format that is usable in most systems; and
• MARC XML – this format is optimized for library catalogues.

You can find the feeds here: http://www.oapen.org/xtf/metadataexports

Practical examples how this integration could look like are provided by OCLC’s WorldCat (http://tinyurl.com/3jqs4hl) and the Universiteitsbibliotheek Gent (http://tinyurl.com/4xdpbq7). Please get in touch with us if you want to enrich your content with the OAPEN collection. The use of the content for this purpose is free of charge.

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4. Become part of the OAPEN collection with your content

If you are a scholarly publisher with a considerable focus on Humanities and Social Sciences and open-minded towards Open Access, or a research institute with a publishing aspiration or scholars in charge of a series; we are pleased to invite you to join our network. By now 23 publishers and research institutes cooperate with us and use OAPEN as means to enhance the visibility and dissemination of their content on a world-wide scale.

The first and easy step on this way is the integration of your content into the OAPEN collection. OAPEN has clear requirements for its members and their content. The requirements cover legal, economic and technical aspects to build a high-quality OAPEN Library. All monographs have to cover the Humanities and Social Sciences in terms of content and be peer-reviewed to meet our quality standards.

Technical and legal requirements for the documents:

• PDF (PDF/A is preferred)

• Quality and file size compliant to common standards

• Searchable full text and where possible, content should be provided with a navigable index

• DC-compliant metadata including English abstracts

• Manual upload of data or harvesting via OAI-PMH from your existing repository

• Clear legal position for the documents including illustrations or other components

If you are currently not meeting all of these requirements, we are pleased to offer you a tailored solution to meet your needs. Many more details are to be found in our publishers’ brochure (http://tinyurl.com/45x2m5g).

For more information on the OAPEN project, please visit http://project.oapen.org or contact Eelco Ferwerda, co-ordinator of OAPEN ( JLIB_HTML_CLOAKING ). Technical questions can be sent to Ronald Snijder ( JLIB_HTML_CLOAKING ).