OAPEN

OAPEN
Name	OAPEN
Formation	2008
Type	Non-profit
Headquarters	The Hague
Region served	International

OAPEN is a digital platform and library initiative focused on the dissemination of scholarly monographs in the humanities and social sciences. Established to address challenges in academic publishing, it collaborates with publishers, libraries, research funders, and universities to promote open access monographs. The initiative operates within a landscape that includes major institutions, funders, and publishers across Europe and North America.

History

OAPEN emerged amid debates involving Open Access Week, Horizon 2020, Research Councils UK, Wellcome Trust, European Commission, and national initiatives such as Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek and Max Planck Society. Early collaborations featured partners like Utrecht University, University of Cambridge, Leiden University, University of Amsterdam, and Ghent University alongside publishers including Brill, Springer Nature, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Palgrave Macmillan. The project intersected with programs from SPARC, Directory of Open Access Books, Jisc, LIBER, and Science Europe. Key milestones paralleled events such as the adoption of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, discussions at the London Book Fair, presentations at the European Research Council workshops, and policy shifts influenced by the Plan S coalition and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.

Mission and Scope

The mission aligns with mandates from funders like Research England, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, NWO, and agencies such as Canadian Institutes of Health Research and National Science Foundation that affect scholarly communications. OAPEN’s scope encompasses partnerships with academic libraries including Bibliothèque nationale de France, British Library, Bodleian Library, National Library of Scotland, and consortia such as Consortium of European Research Libraries and HathiTrust Digital Library. It complements infrastructures such as Crossref, DOAJ, ORCID, COPE, and indexing services exemplified by Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, and WorldCat.

Collections and Content

Collections aggregate peer-reviewed monographs, edited volumes, and book chapters provided by publishers like Routledge, SAGE Publications, Taylor & Francis, De Gruyter, Manchester University Press, Indiana University Press, Chicago University Press, MIT Press, Yale University Press, Columbia University Press, Princeton University Press, Harvard University Press, Stanford University Press, Cornell University Press, University of California Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, Bloomsbury Publishing, Edward Elgar Publishing, Policy Press, Polity Press, Zed Books, Routledge India, SpringerLink, Kluwer, Peter Lang, IB Tauris, Routledge Handbooks, Bloomsbury Academic, McGill-Queen's University Press, University of Toronto Press, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Ashgate, Routledge Advances, Berghahn Books, Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, Verso Books, Fitzroy Dearborn, Haymarket Books, CUP, OUP, Routledge Classics, Palgrave Macmillan US, Bloomsbury Visual Arts, Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, Brill Nijhoff, ECPR Press, Amsterdam University Press, Intellect Books, Open Book Publishers, and Duke University Press. Metadata practices reference standards from MARC21, Dublin Core, ONIX, and identifiers from ISBN and ISSN. The corpus spans authors affiliated with University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Harvard University, Yale University, Princeton University, Columbia University, University of Chicago, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, London School of Economics, King's College London, University of Edinburgh, University of Toronto, McGill University, Australian National University, University of Melbourne, National University of Singapore, Peking University, Tsinghua University, University of Tokyo, Seoul National University, University of São Paulo, and University of Buenos Aires.

Access and Licensing

Access models respond to funder policies like Plan S and publisher frameworks such as Creative Commons. Licensing options include Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY), Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC), Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA), and publisher-specific non-open licenses negotiated with institutions like European University Association and Association of European University Presses. Discovery intersects with services like JSTOR, ProQuest, EBSCO, SSRN, RePEc, and catalogues maintained by OCLC and Europeana.

Technology and Infrastructure

The technical stack integrates with platforms and standards from DSpace, DSpace CRIS, Open Journal Systems, DSpace-CRIS, DSpace 7, OJS, GitHub, Apache Solr, Elasticsearch, Alfresco, IIIF, SWORD protocol, OAI-PMH, and SRU/SRW. Persistent identifiers and metadata workflows use DOI registrations via Crossref and link to researcher identifiers such as ORCID and organizational identifiers like ROR. Preservation strategies coordinate with archives such as CLOCKSS, PKP Preservation Network, Portico, and national digital preservation initiatives including Digital Preservation Coalition and Netherlands e-Science Center collaborations. Integration partners include EBSCOhost, ProQuest Ebook Central, Google Books, Internet Archive, and infrastructure projects like SCOSS and OpenAIRE.

Governance and Funding

Governance has involved boards and advisory groups drawing on representatives from LIBER, SPARC Europe, Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, European University Association, Association of Research Libraries, Council of European Social Science Data Archives, and national agencies such as NWO, DFG, AHRC, Swiss National Science Foundation, and FWO. Funding sources have included grants from European Commission Horizon 2020, institutional contributions from universities like University of Amsterdam and KU Leuven, support from philanthropic organizations including Wellcome Trust and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and collaborative funding mechanisms endorsed by Jisc and DARIAH.

Category:Open access publishing