DOAB successfully relaunches the OPERAS Certification Service on the open source DSpace platform

OPERAS, the European Research Infrastructure for the development of open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities, is glad to announce the successful migration of DOAB to a new open source environment. The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to over 34,000 scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books. Following the migration, all its services will remain free of charge with all data being freely available.

The transition to the DSpace platform is part of the OPERAS-P project and the redevelopment of DOAB as central service is the aim of work package 5 of the OPERAS-P project. OPERAS-P supports the OPERAS Research Infrastructure by furthering the development of the infrastructure in view of achieving the necessary scientific, technical and community maturity.

Niels Stern, Director of OAPEN and co-director of DOAB said

The entire DOAB team is very excited about this development. Transitioning to the open source DSpace platform represents an important next step for the DOAB Foundation and our firm commitment to open science.

The renewed DOAB platform offers additional functionalities and features, improving the service for all stakeholders. Ronald Snijder, Deputy Director at OAPEN Foundation and responsible for the technical aspects of the DOAB platform and services, on the renewed platform:

I am happy that DOAB offers the same integration possibilities as the OAPEN Library. The renewed DOAB platform enables libraries, data aggregators and others to make use of several metadata feeds, OAI harvesting options and connect their applications directly through an API.

The transition of DOAB to an open source environment comes at a time where momentum for OA books is on the rise and access to scholarly books is proving to be of critical importance to users worldwide. Pierre Mounier, Coordinator of OPERAS and co-director of DOAB said

The migration of DOAB to a robust, community-driven, open system such as DSpace, is a milestone in the development of the service. Thanks to the funding coming from the European Commission and the hosting service provided by Huma-Num, DOAB is in an even better position to support bibliodiversity in the open access landscape. The renewed platform provides a sound basis for the future development of the OPERAS certification service that will bring more trust in OA books.

About DOAB

The Directory of Open Access Books is a service of the DOAB Foundation. The DOAB Foundation is a non-profit legal entity under Dutch law (‘stichting’), established by the OAPEN Foundation and OpenEdition. DOAB is currently developing a certification service for OA books as part of the OPERAS research infrastructure.

For more information please contact Lotte Kruijt, Project Manager OAPEN Foundation, (l.kruijt[a]oapen.org).