Find and Publish Open Access Books – Text+ IO-Lecture on OAPEN and DOAB
The Text+ Task Area Infrastructure/Operations (IO) regular lectures have become a popular format for providing insights into numerous topics related to working in and with the Text+ data domains and infrastructures. This includes, of course, the vast field of open access publishing, which was the subject of a recent lecture in the series.
On 10 February, Silke Davison and Sebastiano Sali (both Community Managers at OAPEN) gave an introduction to Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN) and Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) ecosystems, both of which focus on the findability and publication of open access monographs. You can download their presentation at the end of this blog post.
What is behind OAPEN and DOAB?
As Silke Davison outlined in her presentation, OAPEN is a not-for-profit organisation hosted by the KB National Library of the Netherlands in The Hague, which provides a digital library of open access books. Davison highlighted that OAPEN operates as an independent foundation, which means that it cannot be sold or acquired.
The organisation’s mission is to provide a global, open and quality-assured index of scholarly books, as well as additional services in the fields of distribution, quality management and digital preservation to various stakeholders in scholarly publishing. Davison further described the OAPEN Library, which currently contains over 39,000 open access books in multiple languages.

Sebastiano Sali continued with a presentation on DOAB. Launched in 2013, DOAB is an indexing and discovery service that provides metadata for and access to open access publications. Like OAPEN, DOAB is a nonprofit institution, covering multiple languages and publishers. Sali explained that although these two services are separate entities, they are jointly managed by the same organisation. DOAB currently indexes over 90,000 titles and collaborates with various international organisations, including the African Platform for Open Scholarship.

In addition to OAPEN and DOAP, Davison and Sali also introduced the OA Books Toolkit, a comprehensive guide on open access book publishing, funding options and relevant policies. The Toolkit can be described as a curated knowledge base of primary sources such as articles, case studies and more; a practical help for researchers and policy makers.
Discussion on Promoting OAPEN & DOAB
The presentations were followed by a lively discussion. Participants asked about strategies for promoting the OAPEN and DOAB directories within the NFDI community. Davison acknowledged that their ongoing outreach efforts do indeed face challenges when it comes to reaching researchers directly. She was optimistic that the NFDI can act as a bridge to individual scholars. Sali said he considered deepening collaborations with libraries and research data infrastructures a promising way to increase awareness and accessibility in the field of scholarly publishing.
Other topics discussed were the potential utilisation of DOAB for large language models and the Metadata Module Export (MIMO) in OAPEN. MIMO is a tool that allows users to extract specific, subject-based data from the OAPEN library. Davison explained that it is particularly useful for researchers who want to incorporate OAPEN data into their own projects. Margo Bargheer, a researcher at the University of Göttingen, proposed that the OAPEN library or the DOAB catalogue could provide a valuable dataset for training large language models, while also highlighting the complexity of licensing within OAPEN. However, she noted that the use of content for AI models might still be feasible.
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OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Stefan Buddenbohm (28. Februar 2025). Find and Publish Open Access Books – Text+ IO-Lecture on OAPEN and DOAB. Text+ Blog. Abgerufen am 18. März 2025 von https://doi.org/10.58079/13ej3