OAPEN and DOAB: Putting equity into action
Silke Davison
Tue 08 Oct 2024
This blog follows the participation of Silke Davison, Community Manager, in the opening discussion panel, ‘Who cares about equity? How different stakeholders of the open access scholarly publishing landscape approach equity’ at the 2024 OASPA Conference in Lisbon, Portugal, from 16-18 September.
OAPEN and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) are two independent, not-for-profit, open infrastructure services for open access (OA) books. They are Dutch ‘Stichting’ (foundations) operating out of the Royal Library (Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB)) in The Hague, in The Netherlands, but are not part of the KB, we rent office space from them (along with several other international organisations such as LIBER, IFLA and Europeana).
OAPEN may have begun as a European project idea in 2007 (and formal project in 2008), but regardless of our origins and geographical location (and that of DOAB’s), both organisations remain committed to disseminating, promoting, and supporting open access (OA) books to a global audience, to enable equitable access to knowledge. In this blog post, while it would be near-impossible to include everything in one short post, we will address several of the myriads of ways we are putting equity into action.
The OAPEN strategy focuses on three of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) most relevant to the organisation. These are: Quality Education (SDG 4), Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure (SDG 9), and Reduced Inequalities (SDG 10). SDG 10 is specifically poignant in the context of equity, as it’s OAPEN’s mission to promote and support equitable open access distribution opportunities for scholarly publishers globally and foster equity through bibliodiversity, not just in content but also through the publishers we host in the OAPEN Library and who participate in DOAB. Activities relating to this include engaging in collaborative initiatives to support equity, encouraging geographic dispersal of OA books for the OAPEN Library, and promoting multilingualism within the OAPEN Library, DOAB and through our different partnerships.
OAPEN is also involved in the Open Book Collective (OBC), who themselves have an equitable business model that collates funds and distributes them proportionally across various OA book publishers and service providers (of which OAPEN and DOAB are). Some of the money they receive from these publishers and service providers also goes to their grant funding programme, the Collective Development Fund.
Our library supporter programme takes into consideration the differences between libraries, and we have tiered levels of support for institutions based on their size and where they are geographically. Additional discounts on support can be available for consortia supporters. Any library can benefit from the OAPEN Library, as it is free to use and incorporate into their catalogue without requiring permission from us, but those who can and align with our mission and values gratefully support us.
DOAB has its own equitable initiatives, with a large focus on the continent of Africa, but also other regions less well represented in DOAB such as Asia and the Middle East. The small-scale DOAB in Africa project aims to address African publishers’ equitable access to the OA distribution channels and provide equitable access to the discoverability services for all publishers that fulfil its requirements. DOAB will be part of the EU-funded ALMASI project in 2025, a project about international coordination of diamond OA publishing between Latin America, Europe, and Africa. DOAB has a small part in the project which is about promoting OA infrastructures to book publishers in Africa. ALMASI is the Swahili word for ‘diamond’, and this is just one of the most significant ways we are increasing our engagement in diamond OA for books.
Tangible evidence of fostering greater equity within the OA books landscape is evident in the growth in the number of books available in the OAPEN Library and DOAB. In 2023 alone we saw 5000+ OA books added to the OAPEN Library, and 14,000+ records added to DOAB. A similar pattern can be seen with the 95+ publishers added to DOAB in 2023 too. The number of titles in different languages is growing too, with substantial collections in Spanish, French, German, Russian, Norwegian, and Dutch.
We know that thousands of libraries include the OAPEN Library and DOAB collections via their preferred knowledge base (e.g., ExLibris, OCLC), our open API, or directly through our open metadata export and recognise that having all these options available is hugely important to create equity across the globe. It also provides publishers (and therefore authors) of all shapes and sizes with equal distribution opportunities to be found by library patrons via the library discovery system.
We are also very active in the community and participate in conferences and webinars globally, engaging with all stakeholders in the OA books landscape. In 2023, we were present at 23 events and attended even more online. You can find a list in our 2023 Stakeholder Report (see Appendix).
OAPEN operates the Open Access Books Toolkit, a free, community-led, and diverse resource for researchers providing information about publishing an OA book. Recently, the Toolkit underwent a rebrand and renewal, adding 10 more articles to its already comprehensive collection and including a new section on policy developments for OA books, in line with the EU-funded PALOMERA project that we’ve been involved with since the project begun in January 2023.
Achieving an equitable scholarly communications landscape is not without its challenges and we still have lots to put into action before we reach this goal; it’s certainly not something done in silo. We want to thank all our partners and supporters who enable us to carry out this work and recognise the importance of achieving an equitable OA books landscape alongside us.