Creation of DOAB Foundation

OAPEN Foundation (Netherlands) and OpenEdition (France) are pleased to announce the creation of DOAB Foundation as a joint venture between the two partners. The mission of the new foundation is to provide an independent and trustworthy Directory of Open Access Books to the academic community and the general public.

• DOAB was developed in 2012 by OAPEN as a dedicated discovery service for Open Access books, next to the existing OAPEN Library. Since then, the directory became one of the fastest growing Open Access resources, and now indexes more than 16,500 Open Access books from 315 publishers worldwide.
• In 2012, OAPEN and OpenEdition partnered in DILOH. This is a project funded by the French government under the “investissement d’avenir” label to enable the French academic production in the social sciences and humanities reach an international audience and support the development of DOAB.
• In 2017 OAPEN and OpenEdition partnered with 8 other parties in HIRMEOS, a project funded by the European Commission under the framework “Horizon 2020” to develop innovative services for Open Access books. In HIRMEOS, OAPEN and OpenEdition worked together to add a Certification Service on peer review to DOAB.
• In 2018, the French Minister of Research Frédérique Vidal adopted a National Plan for Open Science and included in the Plan’s action points, the creation of the Franco-Dutch foundation.
• On the 5th of March 2019, DOAB was established as a foundation under Dutch law, in co-ownership between OAPEN Foundation and OpenEdition, legally represented by CNRS and Aix-Marseille University, its governing institutions.

The creation of DOAB as an independent, non-profit legal entity is a milestone in the history of the directory and of the longstanding partnership between OAPEN and OpenEdition. It will ensure DOAB’s sustainability and continued ability to serve the needs of the academic community, including funders, libraries, publishers, researchers and the general public.

Upon the creation of the Foundation, Eelco Ferwerda, Director of OAPEN declared:

“We have been very pleased with how DOAB has developed into an essential resource for Open Access books, and I want to thank Lars Bjørnshauge for his help with the development of the service and Salam Baker Shanawa of Sempertool for providing the platform and supporting its operation. Our collaboration with OpenEdition has been invaluable in the development of DOAB and in close partnership we now hope to add a new level of quality assurance and transparency to our service.”

Marie Pellen, Director of OpenEdition, declared:

“OpenEdition’s commitment to support the development of DOAB is one of the first concrete results of the French National Plan for Open Science adopted by the Minister of Research Frédérique Vidal. Thanks to the joint support of CNRS and Aix-Marseille University, we are pleased to take an active part in an international platform crucial for the humanities and the social sciences.”

Pierre Mounier, Deputy Director of OpenEdition and Co-coordinator of OPERAS declared:

“The creation of DOAB Foundation is a unique opportunity to develop an open and community-driven infrastructure in the field of scholarly communication as part of OPERAS’ global effort to implement open science practices in the social sciences and humanities.”

In the coming months, OAPEN and OpenEdition will work together with other OPERAS partners to upgrade the DOAB platform and integrate it in its institutional context: DOAB will eventually become one of the core services of OPERAS, the European Research Infrastructure for open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities.

About OAPEN Foundation

The OAPEN Foundation was established in 2011 to support the transition to Open Access books. The OAPEN Library hosts one of the largest collections of freely accessible academic books. OAPEN works with publishers and funders to build a quality-controlled collection of OA books, and provides services for publishers, libraries, and research funders in the areas of deposit, quality assurance, metadata enhancement, dissemination, and digital preservation.

About OpenEdition

OpenEdition is a comprehensive digital publishing infrastructure at the service of scientific information in the humanities and social sciences. Recognised as national research infrastructure since 2016, OpenEdition was developed by OpenEdition Center, a service and research unit (USR 2004) of the CNRS, Aix-Marseille University, the EHESS, and the University of Avignon. A public non-profit initiative supported by major research institutions, whose main mission is the promotion of open access digital publishing, OpenEdition also aligns its work with the framework of the Comité pour la science ouverte (French open science committee).

About OPERAS

OPERAS is the European research infrastructure for the development of open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities. Its main goal is to coordinate and pool university-led scholarly ­communication activities in Europe in the social sciences and humanities, in view of enabling open science as the standard practice. OPERAS currently counts 40 members from 16 countries and is led by a Core Group of 9 institutions.

About DOAB Foundation

DOAB (the Directory of Open Access Books) provides a quality-controlled list of open access book publishers and their peer-reviewed books. DOAB enables researchers, libraries, and discovery services to easily identify and search peer-reviewed, open access monographs, thereby improving discovery, access, and usage of monographs all over the world. Publishers can apply to be listed in DOAB through an application procedure. Publishers that meet DOAB’s requirements are listed in the directory and can upload the metadata of their Open Access books. Metadata are harvestable through the OAI-PMH protocol by third parties, such as libraries and discovery services, to increase discovery and usage of Open Access books. In addition, DOAB has an automated upload service for Open Access books from trusted Open Access platforms.