DOAB celebrates its 10th anniversary!
Silke Davison
Mon 24 Jul 2023
This year, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), led by OpenEdition and OAPEN Foundation, celebrates its 10th anniversary. Since its inception, DOAB has evolved from an idea for indexing high quality peer-reviewed open access books and chapters to a globally used and open directory serving not only researchers and the wider scholarly community, but also the public.
Back in 2009, following the successful example of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the OAPEN project leaders thought to create a similar resource for open access books and chapters. Discussions first took place at the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) conference in Lund in 2010.
DOAB was officially launched at the First International Conference on OA Monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences in April 2013. The difference between the OAPEN Library and DOAB is that DOAB is a directory linking to open access books and chapters on other platforms and publishers’ websites to increase discoverability, whereas the OAPEN Library is a digital library where you can access the full text. They both share a mission to increase trust in open access books and book publishing.
DOAB becomes and independent not-for-profit organisation
DOAB was established as a Foundation in March 2019 under Dutch Law, jointly managed and governed by the OAPEN Foundation and OpenEdition, the French national infrastructure dedicated to open scholarly communication in the SSH. The creation of DOAB as an independent, not-for-profit legal entity ensures its sustainability to continually serve the needs of the academic community, including libraries, publishers, researchers, funders, and the public.
Marie Pellen, Director of OpenEdition, says: “DOAB is a successful example of European cooperation across borders. We are delighted to see DOAB becoming more mature and recognised as a crucial infrastructure for open science. We are grateful to CNRS, Aix-Marseille University and the French Ministry of Research for their constant support. This common effort enables us to create a resource that serves the research community worldwide and promotes bibliodiversity in scholarly publishing.”
In 2020, DOAB was jointly chosen alongside OAPEN for the SCOSS second funding cycle which aims to help infrastructures become more sustainable and financially independent. SCOSS encourages universities who are invested in open science and open access to support the non-commercial services on which it depends; DOAB and OAPEN are crucial infrastructures that support the transition to open access book publishing and increase trust in the industry.
DOAB today
DOAB is an open infrastructure committed to open science. Its main mission is to increase discoverability of open access books and maximise their dissemination, visibility and impact. All DOAB services are free of charge and all data is freely available.
At the time of the launch, DOAB contained 750 books from 20 publishers. Today, DOAB includes over 68,000 open access books and book chapters from over 600 publishers in more than 60 languages.
DOAB created the Trusted Platform Network to enhance the discoverability of open access books and enable a more seamless process for publishers to list their open access books by allowing them to check whether their content meets the DOAB criteria and automatically list books and chapters.
In November 2022, the Peer Review Information Service for Monographs (PRISM) was launched to further build trust in peer review and open access academic book publishing. PRISM is a standardised way for academic publishers to display information about their peer review processes across their entire catalogue. The PRISM logo is included on title level and at metadata level. PRISM is now integrated in the OPERAS portfolio of services and, thanks to this, is exposed in the EOSC marketplace.
Looking to the future
DOAB is designed to improve transparency around the quality assurance practices in open access book publishing by further developing the PRISM service and intend to continue to build trust by partnering with more publishers and aggregators globally to expand the directory for researchers, the wider scholarly community, and the public to discover.
DOAB is still mainly populated with publishers from Europe and North America, so it aims to prioritise being more globally inclusive in the coming years, supporting bibliodiversity. An important part of DOAB’s mission is to enable equitable access to global distribution for book publishers and authors, in the same way that open access books are already provided to libraries and readers globally. DOAB seeks to serve open and equitable scholarly publishing in the best possible ways.
Explore the collection today!