Open Access eBooks: Part Three – DOAB | No Shelf Required

"The Directory of Open Access Books – The DOAB – is a service of the OAPEN Foundation.  As of Monday evening, they provided the metadata for 1217 peer reviewed, academic, open access ebooks from 33 publishers.  I featured the OAPEN on Monday in my open access post.  The difference between these two services is that the DOAB contains only the metadata.  The full-text must be downloaded from various publisher sites (links are provided).  The OAPEN on the other hand, provides the metadata and full-text of the titles. According to their website, 'The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. Academic publishers are invited to provide metadata of their Open Access books to DOAB. Metadata will be harvestable in order to maximize dissemination, visibility and impact. Aggregators can integrate the records in their commercial services and libraries can integrate the directory into their online catalogues, helping scholars and students to discover the books. The directory will be open to all publishers who publish academic, peer reviewed books in Open Access and should contain as many books as possible, provided that these publications are in Open Access and meet academic standards.' Libraries are welcome to add the metadata to their own catalogs.  Metadata also includes the licensing for each title. Metadata can be downloaded here:  http://doabooks.org/doab?func=about&uiLanguage=en#metadata either through OAI Harvesting or downloading a CSV file. They also offer html for embedding DOAB search boxes onto one’s website ..."