Directory of Open Access Books

Directory of Open Access Books
Name	Directory of Open Access Books
Founded	2012
Headquarters	Netherlands
Languages	Multilingual
Access	Open access

Directory of Open Access Books is an online index that catalogs peer-reviewed open access monographs and edited collections. Launched to improve discoverability of scholarly books, it aggregates metadata from publishers, libraries, and consortia to support researchers, librarians, and policymakers. The project intersects with major infrastructures, publishers, and academic initiatives across Europe, North America, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

History

The project emerged in the context of initiatives such as Plan S, Horizon 2020, OpenAIRE, European Research Council, Wellcome Trust, National Science Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Gates Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Jisc, Sage Publications, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Springer Nature, Elsevier, Taylor & Francis Group, De Gruyter, Brill Publishers, Johns Hopkins University Press, MIT Press, University of California Press, Stanford University Press, Harvard University Press, Yale University Press, Princeton University Press, Columbia University Press, Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, Bloomsbury Publishing, Indiana University Press, University of Toronto Press, Manchester University Press, Edinburgh University Press, Cornell University Press, University of Chicago Press, Duke University Press, SUNY Press, McGill-Queen's University Press and national libraries including British Library, Library of Congress, Bibliothèque nationale de France, National Library of Norway, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Biblioteca Nacional de España and Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Early collaborations referenced metadata standards advocated by Dublin Core, OAI-PMH, and projects like Directory of Open Access Journals, Crossref, ORCID, DataCite, WorldCat, Google Books, HathiTrust, Europeana, Digital Public Library of America, CORE, BASE, Bielefeld Academic Search Engine, OpenEdition, SciELO Books, Redalyc, JSTOR, Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive, ERIC, SSRN and national open access mandates such as those from Wellcome Trust and Research Councils UK.

Organization and Governance

Governance structures drew on models from Open Knowledge Foundation, Creative Commons, SPARC, Confederation of Open Access Repositories, International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, Association of Research Libraries, OAPEN Foundation, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Knowledge Unlatched, COPIM, OPERAS, EKT National Documentation Centre, Europeana Foundation, UNESCO, OECD, European Commission, Council of Europe, World Health Organization, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, Gates Foundation partnerships and consortia such as COAR, DARIAH, CLARIN, LIBER, EBSCO Information Services, ProQuest, Wiley-Blackwell, Ithaka S+R, The Open University, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, University College London, ETH Zurich, Max Planck Society, Karolinska Institutet, Weizmann Institute of Science, University of Melbourne, University of Toronto, Peking University, Tsinghua University, University of São Paulo, University of Cape Town, National University of Singapore, Seoul National University.

Content and Coverage

The catalog indexes scholarly monographs, edited volumes, textbooks, and research handbooks from university presses, commercial publishers, scholarly societies, and institutional repositories. Subject breadth spans humanities and social sciences titles from presses like Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Harvard University Press, Princeton University Press, alongside STEM volumes from Springer Nature, Elsevier, MIT Press, Wiley, CRC Press and area studies works held by African Books Collective, CLIO, Peeters Publishers, I.B. Tauris, Routledge, Bloomsbury Academic, Brill, De Gruyter, Palgrave Macmillan, Manchester University Press, Edinburgh University Press, Zed Books, Rowman & Littlefield, SpringerOpen, MDPI Books, Open Book Publishers, University of Michigan Press, Duke University Press, Cornell University Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, SUNY Press, McGill-Queen's University Press. Metadata fields align with standards from Dublin Core, MARC, ONIX, Crossref, DataCite and identifiers such as ISBN, DOI, ORCID to integrate with discovery services like Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science and WorldCat.

Access Model and Licensing

The directory promotes open licensing practices often using Creative Commons licenses such as Creative Commons Attribution, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial, and Creative Commons Zero. Licensing choices interact with publisher policies from entities like Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Springer Nature, Elsevier, Taylor & Francis Group, Wiley, SAGE Publications, Brill Publishers, De Gruyter and repository policies of arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv, SSRN, HAL, Zenodo, Figshare, Zenodo and institutional repositories at Harvard University, MIT, Stanford University and University of California. Technical interoperability leverages protocols from OAI-PMH, SWORD, RESTful API implementations and metadata standards supported by Crossref and DataCite.

Partnerships and Funding

Funding and partnerships have involved research funders, foundations, university presses, library consortia and international organizations including Wellcome Trust, Horizon 2020, European Commission, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Gates Foundation, Jisc, SPARC, OAPEN Foundation, Knowledge Unlatched, COPIM, LIBER, COAR, OPERAS, OpenAIRE, Crossref, DataCite and national research agencies like National Science Foundation, Research Councils UK, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Agence Nationale de la Recherche, Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek and university presses including Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, MIT Press, Springer Nature, Elsevier, Taylor & Francis Group.

Impact and Reception

Scholars, librarians, and policymakers have referenced the directory in discussions alongside Plan S, Open Access Button, Directory of Open Access Journals, OpenAIRE, SPARC, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, Jisc, COPE, ICOLC, Ithaka S+R, European University Association, Association of Research Libraries, Creative Commons, UNESCO, OECD, World Bank, Gates Foundation and national initiatives such as those in United Kingdom, United States, Germany, France, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, India, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Citation analyses and usage statistics have been compared with repositories like HathiTrust, Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, JSTOR and aggregators such as Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science, informing debates on discoverability, sustainability, and quality assurance in open scholarly monograph publishing.

Category:Open access