DOAB Press release
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Press release
The Hague, February 29, 2012
A new service for Open Access Monographs: the Directory of Open Access Books.
OAPEN is pleased to announce a new service for Open Access monographs: the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB). DOAB will provide a searchable index to peer-reviewed monographs and edited volumes published under an Open Access business model, with links to the full texts of the publications at the publisher’s website or repository. The beta version of the service will contain publications of a selected number of academic publishers. The beta version will be made public early spring 2012.
The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. Academic publishers will be invited to provide the metadata of their Open Access books to the DOAB. Metadata will be harvestable in order to maximize dissemination, visibility and impact. Aggregators can integrate the records in their commercial services and libraries can integrate the directory into their online catalogues, thereby helping scholars, students and the general public to discover the books. The directory will be open to all academic publishers and should contain as many books as possible, provided that these books are peer reviewed and published in Open Access. DOAB will determine requirements for publishers to qualify as Open Access academic book publishers and will maintain a certification procedure.
A number of academic publishers have already expressed their interest in taking part in the further development of the service; among them are members of the OAPEN Library such as Amsterdam University Press and Göttingen University Press, and other well-known Open Access publishers such as Open Book Publishers, Open Humanities Press, MPublishing and Athabasca University Press. OpenEdition, a portal dedicated to electronic resources in the humanities (www.openedition.org), will also take part in the beta phase of DOAB.
DOAB will be launched by the OAPEN Foundation. The idea for DOAB has been developed with Lars Bjørnshauge and Salam Baker Shanawa (director of SemperTool), who were also responsible for the development of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Both will be involved in the further development of DOAB.
OAPEN will manage the service and approach publishers to provide the metadata of their Open Access books. OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks, www.oapen.org) started in 2008 as an EU-funded project coordinated by Amsterdam University Press. The OAPEN Foundation is an international initiative dedicated to Open Access monograph publishing, based at the National Library in The Hague. OAPEN develops Open Access models for books and works with academic publishers and research institutes to build a collection of Open Access books through the OAPEN Library. OAPEN is currently involved in two pilot projects in the Netherlands and the UK experimenting with Open Access monograph publishing.
SemperTool will develop and maintain the service. SemperTool (www.sempertool.dk) is a software development company specializing in building digital library technologies, as well as providing hosting and consulting services. Salam Baker Shanawa, director of SemperTool, was in charge of development of DOAJ while employed at Lund University, and for the past two years SemperTool has been responsible for further development and maintenance of DOAJ. SemperTool offers a range of reliable and cost-effective software solutions for digital libraries, and serves more than 100 universities in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
Lars Bjørnshauge will be involved in the further development of DOAB and its business model. Lars founded and managed DOAJ during his service as Director of Libraries at Lund University, Sweden. Currently Lars is SPARC’s Director of European Library relations and Senior Advisor to the National Library of Sweden.
For more information, please contact Eelco Ferwerda, director of the OAPEN Foundation, JLIB_HTML_CLOAKING , +31(0)629565168.
Newsletter September 2011
1. Visit OAPEN at the Frankfurt Bookfair
OAPEN will have its own stand at the Fair, in order to talk to interested publishers and aggregators. If you wish to learn more about OAPEN at the fair, please make an appointment with Eelco Ferwerda, director of the OAPEN foundation ( JLIB_HTML_CLOAKING ). You will find us in Hall 4.2, J440.
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2. OAPEN partners with OCLC, Ex Libris and Serials Solutions
We are pleased to announce that the OAPEN Library is now included in the library discovery services of three leading providers for automated library solutions: WorldCat by OCLC, Primo Central Index by Ex Libris and Summon by Serials Solutions. Through these partnerships OAPEN aims to ensure worldwide visibility and discoverability of the collection of Open Access books within the OAPEN Library.
WorldCat itemizes the collections of over 71,000 libraries in 112 countries. It contains more than 150 billion different records. Inclusion in the WorldCat brings worldwide visibility for content, authors and publishers and ensures efficient discoverability of scientific information at the workplace of the researcher. WorldCat is built and maintained by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) and is free of use for libraries.
The Primo Central index is an aggregation of hundreds of millions of scholarly e-resources of global and regional importance. These include journal articles, e-books, newspapers, reviews, legal documents and other items of scholarly interest that are harvested from primary and secondary publishers and aggregators, and from open-access repositories. The Primo Central Index – which now includes the OAPEN Library - is an integral part of the Primo discovery and delivery solution and is also available through the Ex Libris MetaLib ™ metasearch solution.
Serials Solutions offers Summon as discovery solution for libraries. The content types include library catalogue records, e-journal articles, databases, newspaper articles, e-books, dissertations, institutional repositories, conference proceedings, grey literature, cited references, reports, digital library and more. A special feature of Summon is the expansion of libraries' collections with valuable, freely available repository content. Users can discover content from more than 39 open access archives and 257 institutional repositories from 73 different institutions representing more than 40 million records that have been ingested into the Summon service, most with full-text indexing.
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3. OAPEN partners with OASPA - discount for our members
We are pleased to announce that OAPEN is a partner of OASPA, the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association. OASPA has included book publishers in its mission statement ‘to support and represent the interests of Open Access (OA) journal and book publishers globally in all scientific, technical, and scholarly disciplines’.
OAPEN members will receive a special discount of 25% on their OASPA-membership fee when joining OASPA. In addition, OAPEN members benefit from a simple application procedure and special rates for the yearly COASP, the Conference for Open Access Scholarly Publishers.
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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 ).
Newsletter August 2011
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
).
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