DOAB officially launches its new service to further build trust in peer review and open access academic book publishing

The Hague, 16 November 2022. The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), a community-driven discovery service for open access books, is launching its Peer Review Information Service for Monographs (PRISM). PRISM is a service provided by DOAB as part of the OPERAS service portfolio.

PRISM is a standardised way for academic publishers to display information about their peer review processes across their entire catalogue. On the DOAB site, you can see a PRISM logo next to a publisher and next to the individual book. PRISM peer review information is also included at the metadata level, making it available through the DOAB API which is freely distributed and incorporated into library search tools worldwide. Learn more about PRISM, including how to participate as a publisher here.

“DOAB and its community have been discussing and developing PRISM for a few years, and following a successful beta-testing phase, we are pleased to now launch the service, inviting publishers and stakeholders to engage with it” said Niels Stern, co-director of DOAB.

DOAB (including PRISM) is overseen by a Scientific Committee, which validates and reviews requirements, and acts as a Board of Appeal for complaints from publishers.

How can PRISM help me?

PRISM’s goal is to provide transparency about the peer review process(es) that apply to publishers’ books with the intention of building trust in open access academic book publishing.

  • For publishers: PRISM helps you display the peer review process that has been applied to books in your collection. This helps you showcase how you apply best practices in peer review.
  • For librarians: PRISM allows you to see the quality control process that applies to a given book. This will give you confidence in recommending the book as a reliable source to your researchers and students.
  • For funders: PRISM gives you more detailed information about the quality assurance process of the research outputs you’ve funded.
  • For researchers, students, or general readers: PRISM allows you to see the quality control process that applies to a given book. This gives you more information about the publisher.

About DOAB & OPERAS The Directory of Open Access Books is a discovery service indexing over 60,000 open access books from 600+ publishers from around the world. DOAB is a service of the DOAB Foundation, a not-for-profit established by the OAPEN Foundation and OpenEdition.

PRISM is part of the OPERAS Services Portfolio. OPERAS is the European Research Infrastructure for the development of open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities with the aim to coordinate and federate resources in Europe to efficiently address the scholarly communication needs of European researchers in the field of SSH.

Contact: Lotte Kruijt, Publisher Relations Manager, l.kruijt[@]oapen.org

PRISM has been in the works for several years, and made possible thanks to European Funding through the HIRMEOS and OPERAS-P projects. The development of the service will be continued through the OPERAS PLUS project

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