Open Access to Books – the Perspective of a Non-profit Infrastructure Provider

The Start of OAPEN

The first discussions about what later would become the OAPEN platform were held at the opening conference of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) in Brussels in early 2007. At one of the sessions, Sijbolt Noorda, then president of the University of Amsterdam, argued that OA should be extended to the humanities and therefore include books. After that session, a number of directors of university presses gathered to talk about OA books. Noorda pointed to a potential funding opportunity from the European Commission, the eContentplus grant. Amsterdam University Press (a subsidiary of the University of Amsterdam) coordinated with some of the university presses from the meeting and contacted other potential partner presses in Europe to prepare an application for eContentplus.

Our proposal was submitted to the European Commission in September 2007 under the acronym OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) with seven participants from six countries. Six participants were European university presses: Amsterdam University Press (project lead), Göttingen University Press, Manchester University Press, Museum Tusculanum Press (connected to the University of Copenhagen), Presses universitaires de Lyon (a department of Université Lumière Lyon 2), and Firenze University Press. The seventh participant was the Digital Production Centre of the University Library of the University of Amsterdam as a technical partner to develop the central infrastructure. In addition, there were several other participants in the project, among them the Books and Digital Media Studies program of Leiden University as a research partner and subcontractor.

We include here the abstract of the proposal:

OPEN ACCESS PUBLISHING IN EUROPEAN NETWORKS (OAPEN) is a 30-month target project to develop and implement an open access (OA) publication model for academic books in the humanities and social sciences (HSS). The project aims to achieve a sustainable European approach to improve the quantity, visibility, and usability of high-quality OA content and foster the creation of new content by developing future-oriented publishing solutions, including an online library dedicated to HSS.

The main results will be:

1. a sustainable OA-publishing process dedicated to academic works in HSS;

2. a publishing platform primarily dedicated to monograph content in HSS, in all its dimensions (text, multimedia, data, reviewing, reader interaction), based on an existing publishing infrastructure; and

3. Networked Online Library: the largest freely available multilingual collection of current, coherent content in various fields of HSS.

OAPEN addresses the needs of SME and not-for-profit publishers and seeks to offer solutions to both publishers and other stakeholders, such as authors, libraries, research funding bodies, and policy makers. OAPEN will aggregate content from other SME publishers in HSS, in order to expand the available open access content by achieving critical mass and building up the European Digital Library.

The project, in which European university publishers take the initiative to develop an OA model geared towards quality book publishing, is the first of its kind.

The OAPEN project was selected for funding by the European Commission and ran from September 2008 to March 2011. The project had three main outcomes: a publishing model for OA books, the OAPEN Library, and a user needs study into OA book publishing. The OAPEN Library (described in more detail in the next section) was launched at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2010, with 750 OA books from 13 publishers. The study Digital Monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Report on User Needs was published in 2010 (Adema and Rutten 2010).

OAPEN Foundation

As the project progressed, it became clear that one of the assumptions behind the project—that the participating presses would take ownership of the OAPEN Library and would develop shared publishing services for OA books—was not viable. The presses did not have the resources to cover the organization and running costs of the OAPEN Library and would not be able to invest in expanding the organization to introduce additional publishing services. Amsterdam University Press sought support for an alternative approach, to create a separate entity that could be funded for a limited period by academic institutions in the Netherlands. This eventually led to the establishment of Stichting OAPEN, a non-profit foundation under Dutch law, with its registered office in the National Library in The Hague, in 2011. Stichting OAPEN was founded by the University of Amsterdam, the University of Leiden, Utrecht University Library, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), the National Library of the Netherlands, and Amsterdam University Press. The founding partners committed to financial support for an initial period of three years, with matching funding from the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

OAPEN’s mission was:

• to build a branded collection of open access peer-reviewed titles;

• to increase the visibility and retrievability of high-quality publications; and

• to promote open access book publishing.

OAPEN Services

The OAPEN Library has been set up to host and disseminate OA books. OAPEN supports the transition to OA, regardless of the publishing model, whether the publisher is transitioning from print or is born OA, whether for profit or not. The requirements to join OAPEN only relate to transparency and quality assurance. OAPEN works with publishers to build a quality-controlled collection of open access books and provides services for publishers, libraries, and research funders in the areas of dissemination, quality assurance, and digital preservation.

• Hosting: OAPEN hosts freely available books in a repository providing various means to upload and aggregate publications.

• Dissemination and discovery: OAPEN provides freely available metadata feeds in various formats and works with intermediaries to optimize dissemination and discovery of the collection.

• Digital preservation: OAPEN works with partners to provide a stable repository infrastructure and a digital preservation service in collaboration with Portico.

OAPEN introduced a deposit and collection management service in 2012. The deposit service supports open access policies of research funders and practitioners (research institutions, universities, and their libraries) and provides an institutional uploading service for researchers and publishers. The Austrian Science Fund (FWF) became the first partner. In the following years, OAPEN expanded the service for Knowledge Unlatched (2013), Wellcome (2014), the European Research Council (through three consecutive two-year grants, starting in 2015), the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF, as part of the OAPEN-CH pilot project, 2015), and the Dutch Research Council (NWO, 2020). OAPEN’s collaboration with research funders is detailed in the last section of this article.

In 2013, OAPEN improved its reporting by providing COUNTER-conformant usage statistics in collaboration with IRUS-UK. The next section will describe the technical development of the OAPEN Library, including usage reporting.

The OAPEN Library grew into one of the largest full-text collections of freely available peer-reviewed books: in 2011, the year that OAPEN became a foundation, the OAPEN Library contained fewer than 1,000 books from 30 publishers; at the time of writing, the collection consists of close to 25,000 books from more than 400 publishers.

Pilot Projects to Explore OA Book Publishing

From the start, OAPEN was set up to promote the transition to OA books, often in the form of pilot projects and studies in collaboration with other stakeholders. The first of these projects was OAPEN-NL, a project exploring open access monograph publishing in the Netherlands.

Figure 1.

Figure 1. OAPEN collection growth

OAPEN-NL was a two-year project, starting October 2010, as a collaboration of NWO and SURF Foundation and supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. NWO provided a publication fund to publish OA editions of monographs. Nine publishers took part in the pilot, among them Amsterdam University Press, Leiden University Press, Brill, Springer Science and Business Media, and Wageningen Academic Publishers.

The pilot made use of the model that was developed in the OAPEN project. The publishing model for OA books was based on a hybrid approach, publishing both an OA edition and a conventional edition that is offered for sale. The cost of the OA edition is calculated as the first copy costs of the book, which is all the costs that go into producing the digital file of the publication, including editorial costs and additional expenses for the peer review process, marketing, distribution, and image rights. Publishers charge a fee for the OA edition based on the first copy costs. They can choose to make a printed edition available through print-on-demand or a print run and recover all remaining costs through sales. The pilot involved publishing 50 OA books and 50 comparable conventional books and collecting data about usage, sales, and costs to study the effect of OA on monographs. The pilot included a qualitative component to gather the perceptions and expectations of publishers and authors.

OAPEN-NL found no evidence of an effect of OA on sales, and nor was there an effect on citations (within the timeframe of the project¹). However, there was a clear effect on online usage, measured through book visits and page views in Google Books, and also in comparing online discovery and usage with sales, with on average 20 times more downloads than copies sold. Average costs for the books (averaging 350 pages) amounted to just over €12,000, with almost half these costs, just under €6,000, relating to the first digital copy. The findings of OAPEN-NL were published in a final report in October 2013 (Ferwerda, Snijder, and Adema 2013).

As OAPEN-NL got underway, OAPEN approached Jisc Collections to set up a similar pilot in the United Kingdom. This project came to be known as OAPEN-UK, in which Jisc played a more prominent role than OAPEN. The OAPEN-UK research project (Collins and Milloy 2016a) was a five-year study into open access monograph publishing in the humanities and social sciences. OAPEN-UK was designed to work collaboratively and in an agile manner, supporting and responding to developments in the wider monograph publishing environment. Part of the project consisted of the OAPEN-UK matched pairs pilot (Collins and Milloy 2016b), which ran from 2011 until 2014 to understand what happens when a book is made available as open access. This pilot also covered the effect on sales and usage of the book, but the matched pairs consisted of books that had already been published, although relatively recently. OAPEN- UK didn’t attempt to investigate the costs of OA books, but it did look at how publishers and their supply chains are affected when trying to make an open access monograph available. In total, 47 pairs of books from six publishers were submitted to the pilot. From each pair, a title was randomly selected to be made OA. Publishers received a fixed fee of 6,000 GBP per pair to take part in the pilot. This fee was based on the average outcome of the OAPEN-NL project for first copy costs.

The OAPEN-UK research project also resulted in two guides. The Guide to Creative Commons for Humanities and Social Science Monograph Authors (Collins, Milloy, and Stone 2013) addresses concerns expressed by researchers, learned societies, and publishers and is aimed to help academics when they are faced with making decisions about publishing. The Guide to Open Access Monograph Publishing for Arts, Humanities and Social Science Researchers (Collins, Milloy, and Stone 2015) provides an overview of OA for books and informs researchers about making their work available in open access.

The final pilot, OAPEN-CH, was set up in 2014 with the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). At that time, SNSF had introduced new funding policies that only covered books that were published online and openly accessible after an embargo period of no more than 24 months. The pilot study set out to learn more about the changes to academic publishing and pave the way for future adaptations to funding policies. OAPEN-CH consisted of 53 matched pairs of monographs from 12 publishers. Of the 53 OA monographs, one group was published in open access upon publication, while the other group was already published in a printed edition and made available OA retrospectively.

The findings of the OAPEN-CH pilot (Ferwerda et al. 2018) concurred with those of OAPEN-NL and OAPEN-UK. Making monographs OA had a positive impact on trackability, visibility, international reach, and usage, while there was no negative effect on sales. Average costs for OA monographs—that is, the costs for the first digital copy and additional expenses for the peer review process, marketing, distribution, and image rights—proved to be considerably higher than the average found for OAPEN-NL, approximately 13,800 Swiss francs (compared to €6,000), although it should be noted that the costs for digital monographs from the participating publishers varied considerably. The findings of OAPEN-CH and engagement with publishers helped SNSF to adapt its OA book policy.

Research Funders and OAPEN

A prominent example of OAPEN’s expanded role is its engagement with research funders. As mentioned in the first section, OAPEN provides deposit and collection management services to a handful of research funders: the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), the Dutch Research Council (NWO), Wellcome, and the European Research Council (ERC).

The deposit service supports open access policies of the research funders by providing an uploading service for researchers and publishers of funded OA books. The service is adapted to the specific demands for academic books, making use of the existing metadata standards, classification schemes, and distribution channels for academic books. Within the OAPEN Library, the deposited books become part of their respective funder collection. These collections are distributed and preserved like other books in the OAPEN Library but with the added service that the funder receives usage statistics for its own collection. Next to the deposit service, OAPEN provides flexible services to capture funded books by specific funders that are then added to the respective collection. In a dialogue with the funder, OAPEN can also perform communication activities that promote its collection and policy. OAPEN also manages collections for entities other than research funders—such as the ScholarLed collection and books funded though Knowledge Unlatched—and recently OAPEN agreed with CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to host their SCOAP³ for Books pilot (OAPEN Foundation 2021).

The deposit service and collection management services have in part been developed as a result of three low-value grant projects through the ERC.⁴ The latter of these projects included a feasibility study for the future provision of OAPEN services to research funders that uncovered a very interesting new role for OAPEN. To understand this role, some background to OA book policy development might be helpful.

OA Book Policy Developments

While the few research funders in Europe mentioned above (FWF, SNSF, NWO, ERC, and Wellcome) have been developing and implementing OA book policies over the last five to 15 years, books generally have been omitted from funder open access policies. There are several reasons for this.

Early and important OA initiatives such as the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) from 2001 focused specifically on the journal article, omitting the book in its scope. This focus has remained central to the development and discussions around open access. Furthermore, research funding of and institutional spending on journal acquisitions is much higher than on books, which is also a reason why journal publishing has been given more attention in open access strategies and policies than books.

Yet another and perhaps more important reason is the complexity and diversity of book publishing in terms of the variety of national, regional, and disciplinary contexts, including culture and language (multilingualism), quality assurance standards, transparency, publishing traditions, rewards and incentive structures at universities (including royalties and symbolic capital), and the publishing industry and its market mechanisms in general. This rich and varied book landscape is often referred to as bibliodiversity. Respecting and fostering bibliodiversity should be a cornerstone of open access policies for books to ensure a healthy ecosystem where researchers can continue to communicate their work in the best possible way.

However, the complexity and fragility of the academic book publishing ecosystem requires fine-grained insight and informed attention of policy makers, so they can develop efficient policies that allow the ecosystem to develop and flourish. This complexity, the difference of economies, and the initial high-level focus on journals have led many research funders to neglect books in their policies or to explicitly postpone policies for OA books. Consequently, policies for OA to books have only recently become a focus of attention for research funders (and research performing organizations). However, some recent developments have taken place that are likely to accelerate OA book publishing.

Three important policies were launched in 2021. First, the European Commission updated its OA policy for the Horizon Europe framework program to also mandate immediate OA to peer-reviewed monographs, book chapters, and other long-text publications. The open access policy of the Horizon Europe framework defines the requirements that ERC and the European Commission impose on their grantees during the period 2021–2027. While peer-reviewed monographs were already part of the Annotated Model Grant Agreement for ERC actions (European Commission 2019, 396) under the previous framework program Horizon 2020, the new framework program Horizon Europe has mainstreamed this requirement to all actions: “Beneficiaries must ensure open access to peer-reviewed scientific publications relating to their results. This includes articles and long-text formats, such as monographs and other types of books” (European Commission 2021, 154). Following deposit in a trusted repository, open access to the peer-reviewed publication must be provided immediately upon publication (151). The requirement for immediate OA to books has to our knowledge not previously been demanded in any funder policy.

In the summer of 2021, the UKRI open access policy was published (UKRI 2021). It includes monographs and requires that “the final Version of Record or the Author’s Accepted Manuscript must be free to view and download via an online publication platform, publishers’ [sic] website, or institutional or subject repository within a maximum of 12 months of publication” under a Creative Commons license. There are a number of exceptions related to the licensing part of the policy that allow for some flexibility. The policy applies to books published on or after January 1, 2024, and it is accompanied with some funding.

In the early autumn of 2021, cOAlition S published a statement on OA books as specified by the implementation guidance of Plan S (cOAlition S 2021). The statement, which is not a policy, presents five recommendations that taken together state that all academic books funded by cOAlition S members should be OA upon publication under a Creative Commons license but allow for an embargo period of up to 12 months. As such, the cOAlition S statement balances well between the Horizon Europe and the UKRI policies, including its important fifth recommendation: “cOAlition S funders should financially support Open Access of academic books via their funding schemes and open access publishing business models via dedicated arrangements.”

Funder Forum

While these policy developments took place, OAPEN performed the abovementioned feasibility study bringing together a dozen research funders to discuss OAPEN’s role as infrastructure, service provider, and knowledge exchange coordinator. The timing of this initiative seemed appropriate as a response to the acceleration of OA book policies caused by those three major policy announcements in 2021. The idea of creating a forum for research funders to share ideas and experiences related to OA book infrastructure developments in support of policy implementation was embraced by the participating funders. In fact, one conclusion that came out of talking with the funders was that they would also appreciate such a forum to be able to discuss technical developments of the infrastructures supporting the implementation of their policies—in other words, a forum where decisions also could be made about the development of OAPEN.

At the time of writing, OAPEN is in the process of establishing the documents defining such a Funder Forum (FF). OAPEN has hired a dedicated manager to facilitate this process with a group of funders that have shown initial commitment to the FF. The aim is to kick off the FF in January 2023 with the participation of major European funders and hopefully also with participation from the United States. The FF will be inclusive and open to all funders who are dedicated to enable more open access to books, are specifically interested in sharing experiences of success and challenges, want to engage in the development of the OAPEN infrastructure, and may also want to make use of the deposit and collection management services provided by OAPEN.

PALOMERA

Alongside the development of the FF, OAPEN collaborated with OPERAS in the coordination of an application to a Horizon Europe call for policy alignment of open access books.⁵ The European Commission was calling for improved understanding and analysis of the challenges and bottlenecks preventing more policies for OA books from emerging in the European Research Area (ERA) and for recommendations on how to overcome these challenges and advance OA to books.

Figure 4.

Figure 4. PALOMERA methodology

OAPEN gathered a consortium of 16 partners and proposed a project called Policy Alignment for Open Access Monographs in the European Research Area (PALOMERA) in April 2022. The application was successful, and the project will start in January 2023 and last for 24 months.

Based on surveys, interviews, and workshops, the PALOMERA project will perform a hitherto unseen mapping of the challenges preventing OA book policies from being developed across the ERA, analyze this data, and present recommendations and resources that can facilitate further developments and alignment of OA book policies. A cornerstone of the project’s methodology is to consult the wider OA books community during the process through a series of validation events as shown in the figure below.

The validation events are integrated into the project process to first check that we don’t overlook important data, that our analyses are valid, and that our final recommendations are sound. The overall purpose of the project is to speed up the transition to open access to books. Policies are important drivers to create that transition, and therefore it is crucial to understand how we can help foster more policies that align on a common understanding of the nature of the landscape and that consider the diversity of book publishing as highlighted above. The validation phases will seek to include the variety of stakeholder perspectives that exist to help funders and institutions develop efficient policies and strategies that consider these multifaceted perspectives. The community will be invited to engage in these validation events in different ways, one of which will be through the OABN.

PALOMERA will make all of its results openly available through the OAPEN OA Books Toolkit and through other means of communication. If successful, the project will contribute to the further advancement of open access to books. However, it will only be one step on the road which hopefully will be followed by other projects and activities.

OAPEN and DOAB

While OAPEN may have been the first aggregator of peer-reviewed OA books from multiple publishers worldwide, it is by far not the only one operating today. It lives alongside other important aggregators such as JSTOR, Project MUSE, SciELO Books, and OpenEdition. These aggregators—as well as other local and national repositories—have commonalities and overlaps but also differ as a function of their geographical foundation, in the composition of content on their platforms (OA and non-OA books combined, journals, blogs, etc.), and in their criteria for inclusion.

DOAB weaves these aggregators together or, at least, the books within them that fulfill the requirements of DOAB: namely, peer-reviewed, academic books in open access with a license that allows for re-use (for instance, a Creative Commons license). The recent rapid growth of DOAB solidifies its role as a global hub for OA books that supports DOAB’s mission of increasing the discoverability of OA books. Moreover, bringing together the OA books from the platforms and from the long tail of small presses around the world in a comprehensive directory places DOAB in a unique position to also facilitate conversations around different aspects of OA book publishing. Two such aspects will be addressed here: namely, bibliodiversity and quality assurance in book publishing.

DOAB and Bibliodiversity

The diversity in book publishing practices—academic book formats, technical platforms, languages, specific national book publishing practices, type of publishers, and economic models—also known as bibliodiversity, is defining for a healthy scholarly book publishing environment. Respecting bibliodiversity is independent of open access, but as DOAB is a directory of OA books, open access remains the focus when pursuing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the development of DOAB. To ensure diversity, equity, and inclusion, DOAB makes itself available to all academic publishers across the globe fulfilling the DOAB requirements.

This is no trivial task. DOAB already holds books in more than 80 languages; however, these books mainly come from publishers based in Europe, North America, and South America. Engaging with publishers in other parts of the world requires special language skills and knowledge about publishing practices in particular geographical regions. In addition, it requires substantial coordination capacity within DOAB to manage a truly global directory.

Still, it remains the ambition of DOAB to pursue this goal. The invention of the DOAB Trusted Platform concept has been one fruitful steppingstone towards that goal. In 2021, SciELO Books became a DOAB Trusted Platform and has since very efficiently helped DOAB in assessing applications from Latin American publishers. This collaboration with SciELO Books has also led to an increase in the number of applications coming from Latin America, enriching DOAB and helping those Latin American publishers become more discoverable to readers across the world. Provided DOAB can raise funding to establish similar initiatives in Africa and Asia, bibliodiversity would be significantly supported through global inclusion of publishers in DOAB, ensuring equal access for all publishers (independent of size, publishing language, legal status, etc.) to the state-of-the-art OA book distribution that DOAB offers.

DOAB and Quality Assurance

As mentioned above, one of the criteria for publishers to be included in DOAB is that their books must undergo some form of quality assurance process—that is, external (to the press) peer review. To become part of DOAB, publishers are required to make their peer review policy publicly available (e.g., on their website) to be as transparent as possible about their quality assurance process for their books.

DOAB has developed a service to support this transparency, the so-called Peer Review Information Service for Monographs (PRISM), which is part of the OPERAS service catalogue. This service, which is currently being implemented, provides academic publishers with the opportunity to display information about their peer review procedures across their entire catalogue, for individual book series or even for single books. The goal of the service is to provide transparency around the peer review procedures and thereby build trust in academic book publishing.

The peer review information provided by the publisher is visible to any reader and is also added to the metadata of the books distributed worldwide by DOAB, thus making the information available through library catalogues and all other places where the DOAB data is being used.

To steer this service and its implementation, DOAB will be helped by its Scientific Committee.⁶ The Scientific Committee consists of members with experience or knowledge in humanities and social sciences scholarship and the editorial side of publishing.