OAPEN Newsletter - September 2012

Published on Wednesday, 05 September 2012 07:48 | Written by Ronald Snijder |

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New partners

We are pleased to announce new partners. Hong Kong University Press and Tartu University Press have made a selection of their titles available in the OAPEN Library. Furthermore, the Austrian science fund FWF (Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung) has agreed to make its upcoming FWF E-Book Library available via the OAPEN Library.

Frankfurt

OAPEN will be present at the Frankfurt Book Fair, October 10-12. Our stand is in Hall 4.2 J440. Please contact Eelco Ferwerda at JLIB_HTML_CLOAKING if you’d like to make an appointment about OAPEN or DOAB.

OAPEN books available in WorldCat

All books of the OAPEN Library can now also be found through WorldCat, the world's largest network of library content and services. The books are now discoverable on the OCLC platform, including cataloguing, WorldCat.org and WorldCat Local. We hope this will greatly enhance the visibility of our books.

Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)

Survey

In order to improve DOAB, we invite you to take part in a survey to help us learn about your needs and expectations with respect to the services, workflows and protocols that we are developing. To participate, please click on this link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/DOAB

Online discussion

From the 9th until the 22nd of July DOAB hosted an online discussion on Open Access books with publishers, academics, librarians, and participants from the wider Open Access and publishing community. A variety of topics were discussed ranging from what is an Open Access book, to issues related to quality control, peer review, copyright, and business and funding models for Open Access books. For those who were unable to take part in the discussion, archives of the discussion have been kept here.

DOAB improvements

Several technical improvements have been added to the DOAB site

To enable easier incorporation into library catalogues, we have added the MARCXML metadata format to the OAI-PMH interface: http://www.doabooks.org/doab?func=about&uiLanguage=en#metadata
It is now possible to create a DOAB search box on your website: http://www.doabooks.org/doabSearchBox.html
An RSS feed has been set up to inform you of the latest additions to DOAB. You can open the feed here: http://www.doabooks.org/doab?func=rss

EIFL General Assembly

The EIFL organisation is dedicated to enables access to knowledge through libraries in developing and transition countries. At the EIFL General Assembly, held from 3 to 5 July 2012 , Ronald Snijder gave a presentation on Open Access academic book publishing and the role of OAPEN and DOAB.

Upcoming conferences

OASPA

The 4^th Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing will be held from 19 to 21 of September in Budapest. There will be a special session on Open Access book publishing Wednesday, September 19.

Internet Librarian

Internet Librarian 2012, held from 22 to 24 October in Monterey (USA). Ronald Snijder will give a presentation titled “Starting a New Library in the Google Age”.

Charleston

The Charleston conference (November 7-10, Charleston, South Carolina) has invited Eelco Ferwerda to take part in a session about Open Access Book publishing with case studies from Utah State University, the University of Michigan and OAPEN.

Munin conference

The 7^th Munin conference on Scientific Publishing will be held on November 22 and 23 at the University of Tromsø. There will be a pre-conference workshop about Open Monograph Press with John Willinski and the program includes keynotes from Willinski and Damian Pattinson (PLoS ONE).

Usage statistics

We are pleased to report a steady increase in the usage of the OAPEN Library. In the last 12 months more than 400.000 books were downloaded from the OAPEN Library.

OAPEN Newsletter - May 2012

Published on Wednesday, 23 May 2012 14:33 | Written by Ronald Snijder |

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Launch of the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)

On April 12, OAPEN launched the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB). DOAB is a discovery service for peer reviewed books published under an Open Access license. DOAB provides a searchable index to the information about these books, with links to the full texts of the publications at the publisher’s website or repository. DOAB launched with just over 20 publishers participating with about 750 Open Access books. By now there are 27 publishers with almost 900 Open Access books and more publishers have been approved. The site – currently in beta – can be found here: http://www.doabooks.org.

OAPEN-UK pilot, first results

The OAPEN-UK research project in the UK – funded by JISC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council – has published preliminary findings from the initial focus groups. These focus groups are designed to identify the most significant issues and concerns about OA monograph publishing for each group of stakeholders.
The results are available here: http://oapen-uk.jiscebooks.org/research-findings/y1-initial-focus-groups/

4th Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing

OASPA, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, has announced its 4^th conference. COASP 2012 will take place from September 19th to the 21st, and will be held at the Gerbeaud House in Budapest, Hungary.
This years’ conference will be of special interest for Open Access book publishers, as part of the program will be dedicated to book publishing. OAPEN is pleased to announce that members of OAPEN and DOAB will receive a discounted rate. The deadline for early bird registration is June 15^th. Further details about the conference can be found at http://oaspa.org/conference/.

OAPEN presents at the DFG-Workshop "Open Access für wissenschaftliche Monografien"

The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) held a workshop on Open Access monographs in the German context. Members of the OAPEN Foundation were also invited, and held two presentations:

OA Monographs in an international perspective (by Eelco Ferwerda): http://slidesha.re/JGiuzW
Research on Open Access monographs – a short review (by Ronald Snijder): http://slidesha.re/JGiAre

Inclusion by content aggregators

The contents of the OAPEN Library is not only available through www.oapen.org. OAPEN has also been integrated in two discovery services for libraries: Primo Central (ExLibris) and Summon (SerialsSolutions).

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 interestthat are harvested from primary and secondary publishers and aggregators, and from open-access repositories.

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.

OAPEN usage statistics

OAPEN’s efforts to integrate with discovery services and content aggregators have resulted in a steady increase in the number of visits and visitors. The number of book downloads is of course the most important measure of the success of the OAPEN Library. We are pleased to report that from April 2011 until March 2012 more than 300,000 books were downloaded and that the trend is upwards.

DOAB is launched

Published on Friday, 13 April 2012 09:35 | Written by Ronald Snijder |

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Launch of the Directory of Open Access Books.

OAPEN is pleased to announce the launch of the Directory of Open Access Books(www.doabooks.org), a discovery service for peer reviewed books published under an Open Access license. DOAB provides a searchable index to the information about these books, with links to the full texts of the publications at the publisher’s website or repository.

The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. Academic publishers are invited to provide the metadata of their Open Access books to DOAB. These metadata will be harvestable in order to maximize dissemination, visibility and impact. At the start of the service there are just over 20 publishers participating with about 750 Open Access books and new publishers and books will be added in the next few days. Publishers who wish to participate in DOAB can find more information here. DOAB is launched in a Beta version to enable feedback from users and to further develop the service. We hope to considerably increase the number of publishers and OA books in DOAB in the coming months and thereby create a valuable resource for the scholarly community and interested public.

The Directory of Open Access Books is provided by OAPEN Foundation in cooperation withSemperTool. OAPEN Foundation is an international initiative dedicated to Open Access monograph publishing, based at the National Library in The Hague. DOAB was developed in close cooperation 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).

For more information, please contact Eelco Ferwerda, director of the OAPEN Foundation, JLIB_HTML_CLOAKING , +31(0)629565168.