The OAPEN Foundation (OAPEN) is an independent, not-for-profit Dutch foundation registered at the National Library in The Hague. Dedicated to supporting open access (OA), peer‑reviewed scholarly books, we manage three key infrastructures:
- The OAPEN Library: A global digital library for hosting and disseminating scholarly OA books, free to use, no registration required.
- Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB): A free global discovery service developed in partnership with OpenEdition to index peer-reviewed OA books
- OAPEN Open Access (OA) Books Toolkit: A free resource intended to help authors to better understand open access book publishing and to increase trust in open access books.
OAPEN was developed as a 30-month targeted project co-funded by the EU in its eContentplus-program (2008-2010). The goal of the project was to achieve a sustainable publication model for academic books in humanities and social sciences and to improve the visibility and usability of high quality academic research in Europe. After the close of the project, OAPEN continued its activities as a foundation.
OAPEN Foundation was established by the University of Amsterdam (UvA), the University of Leiden (UL), the University library of Utrecht University (UU), the Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW), the National Library of the Netherlands (KB) and Amsterdam University Press (AUP).
