DOAB, OAPEN and open access books in Germany: a country report

In 2021, for the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and the OAPEN Library we have seen growing interest and uptake amongst the German scholarly community. In no small part, thanks to growing support of the German library community and the addition of new German titles and publishers, a report of which we include below.

Library support

Firstly, we would like to thank all 13 library supporters from Germany who are sustaining our open infrastructure services for open access books: enabling us to continue with our mission to improve the discoverability of open access books while building trust in open access book publishing.

Welcoming new publishers

In 2021 we have welcomed 25 new publishers from Germany to the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and 17 to the OAPEN Library. Open access books from presses such as Reichert Verlag, Verlag Julius Klinkhardt, Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag and many more presses are now easily discoverable for readers worldwide via DOAB and the OAPEN Library.

Thousands of newly added open access books in the German-language

In 2021, we saw the number of open access books and chapters available on the OAPEN Library increase from just over 15,000 titles (2020) to well over 19,000 titles (2021) and for DOAB from 36,000 (2020) to more than 47,000 (2021) titles. Part of this growth comes from the addition of new German language titles, growing by just over 1,000 new publications for both platforms. Bringing the total number of German-language open access titles available now via the OAPEN Library to 5,000+ and to 7,700+ for DOAB.

For the OAPEN Library over a quarter of its books are written in the German-language, whereas over 15% of the open access books indexed in DOAB are German language titles.

Widespread usage of open access books in Germany*

In terms of usage, over 1,3 million open access book downloads have originated from Germany for the OAPEN Library in 2021 alone. Whereas Germany accounts for 12% of all DOAB traffic in 2021: with over 400,000 users and more than half a million sessions. Germany ranks 2nd in terms of its usage of DOAB just after the U.S. (14%).

In 2022, we look forward to continuing to work with the German scholarly community on open access books, inviting publishers, libraries and other stakeholders to engage with us in this effort.

*Data for DOAB is based on Google Analytics data. Data for the OAPEN Library is based on COUNTER data.