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Marking the 15th anniversary of the OAPEN Library 

This year marks the 15th anniversary of the OAPEN Library, which was launched at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2010.  At this year’s fair, we invite you to attend our half hour panel discussion on ‘The Evolution of Open Access Books’ to celebrate the occasion.  It’s happening on Thursday, 16 October from 12:00 to 12:30 CEST at the Innovation Stage (Hall 4.0, H106).   

An anniversary like this provides an excellent moment to reflect on the past, present, and future. Two years ago, I co-wrote the article ‘Open Access to Books – the Perspective of a Non-profit Infrastructure Provider’ (Journal of Electronic Publishing, 2023, https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.3303) that covered the history of OAPEN quite well. A couple of years prior to that, I shared a more personal account of the origins of OAPEN in ‘A brief saga about open access books’ (Nordic Perspectives on Open Science, 2021, https://doi.org/10.7557/11.5751). 

So, in this blog post I will shift focus from the past to where we are today and where we’re heading at OAPEN.  

A good place to begin is our Strategic Plan 2025-2028.  Released at the beginning of this year, the plan is the result of a thorough process involving our team, as well as our Supervisory and Advisory Boards. It sets a clear direction for the future and is defined by six strategic goals. It’s the implementation of the goals, however, that makes the difference. Our team has been working hard to materialise the strategy through concrete action. 

I know that walking through a strategic plan can be quite tedious, so I will keep it brief and share some highlights to give you a general idea of how we are steering OAPEN in times of rapid change. 

Our key stakeholders are libraries, publishers, and funders. Everything we do – and should do – is to address their needs. In this way, we can best serve the research community and thereby also the researchers. We are committed to ensuring that our existing services are available and reliable, that we are able to develop new services, and build capacity for our stakeholders. A central prerogative is to promote and ensure high quality standards, improve the user experience of OAPEN, explore and implement AI where relevant. We also want to build strong partnerships, support equity in the global distribution of open access (OA) books and professionalise our organisation. 

Here’s what we’ve been doing recently to achieve all the objectives:  

  • We have established a partnership with CERN and migrated our DSpace servers to the CERN Data Centre. This reinforces the reliability and robustness of our services.
  • We have commissioned a full technical review of our infrastructures, performed by the Curtin University Institute for Data Science. This review replicated and documented our code base and provided us with an extensive report including a set of recommendations for future developments. The review considered feedback from several partners provided via thorough interviews. Based on stakeholder and partner feedback, we have solidified our backend and defined a technical roadmap based on user needs. 
  • We have revisited and elaborated our evaluation criteria for the inclusion of book publishers and further professionalised our evaluation processes – described in this blog post.
  • We have updated our visual identity and redesigned our website – read more here.
  • We have started conversations with several partners about the ethical use of AI, with a focus on respecting the licensing terms of the works we host.
  • We have joined the newly established OPERAS AI Special Interest Group.
  • We have set up an Ambassador Programme to promote the values of OA in scholarly publishing globally.
  • We have been deeply engaged in international projects focused on strengthening openness, diversity, equity, and inclusion across scholarly disciplines and publishing practices in Europe, but also in other parts of the world, most recently in Latin America and Africa.
  • We have professionalised the organisation by introducing HR policies and support functions, a Jira ticketing system, CRM, and invoicing systems, and external annual financial audit controls.
  • We have expanded our team with exceptionally friendly, engaged, and skilled colleagues representing eight different nationalities.  

Many of these activities are ongoing and keep us all very busy. Constantly improving and fine-tuning our workflows and services requires a lot of effort. Additionally, new activities are in the pipeline, for example – based on the Curtin recommendations – the development of automated workflows for importing OA books into the OAPEN Library and upgrading the DSpace software to the next version. We also want to expand our engagement in the Middle East and Asia while maintaining strong connections to our existing community of libraries and publishers.  

All our services and work invested in them are only made possible through the generous financial support of more than 350 libraries around the world. We are extremely grateful to all those who support us and we invite other libraries to consider doing the same – more info here. Even if financial isn’t possible, there are other important ways to contribute. We encourage libraries to advocate for OA books whenever possible and integrate the OAPEN Library collection of over 40,000 peer-reviewed OA books into their library catalogues, making them immediately available to their patrons. It’s free of charge and there are multiple ways of doing it – see here.  

We also want to thank the hundreds of publishers who trust us to host their books. Without your content there would be no OAPEN Library. If you are a publisher considering joining OAPEN, here’s the info you need to know. 

We also want to extend our gratitude to the research funders we work with. We are immensely grateful for our collaboration and invite other research funding organisations to explore our collection services or consider becoming part of the Policy Forum on OA Books. 

We are fortunate to be part of a vibrant, amicable, and fast-developing community. Good colleagues are foundational to bringing progress and joy to work. This, alongside a strong drive to fulfil our mission and vision, is what personally helps me get up in the morning.  

Since beginning my career in scholarly book publishing in 2003, I have strived to ensure that high quality research published in book form can reach their audiences as far and wide as possible. Open access is the most effective means to ensure this, which is why the work we do at OAPEN is truly meaningful to me.  

Scholarly books that have undergone rigorous peer review and meticulous editorial work deserve to be available not only to scholars and students but also to readers across the globe. When I worked in publishing, I was always fascinated by the interest in research books by audiences far beyond academia. These books often open doors to new perspectives on well-known topics as well as insights into hidden or overlooked parts of humanity and the society we live in.  

Books carry weight and trust. In an increasingly polarised and fragmented society contaminated by misinformation and post-truth claims, scholarly books play a vital role. At a few recent conferences – including at the Open Science Fair 2025 and the UN Science Summit 2025 – I have addressed the work we do to promote and ensure trust in OA book publishing.  

Reflecting on the article “The Aspasia Project: Protecting and Repairing the Infrastructure of the Public Debate” by my good friend and colleague Pierre Mounier, I believe our work contributes to a larger effort of restoring the public knowledge infrastructure. Pierre underscores that this restoration is urgently needed to protect our liberal democracies from ruthless autocrats who want to dominate the world. In this sense, I feel that we – as part of a larger community – are part of an extremely important and existential mission to uphold our values and our way of life and build a better future for the next generations.  

I truly look forward to the next 15 years and to continuing this journey with our fantastic team to fulfil our mission in collaboration with libraries, publishers, funders, and our brilliant community partners across the world. 

Change of technical leadership at OAPEN and DOAB

Shortly after the launch of the OAPEN project back in 2008, I remember that the project coordinator, Eelco Ferwerda at Amsterdam University Press (AUP) introduced a new colleague to the project: Ronald Snijder. Ronald was the Project Supervisor Digital Publications at AUP and introduced to support the technical coordination of the OAPEN project.

After the launch of the OAPEN Library in 2010 and the subsequent establishment of the OAPEN Foundation, Ronald became the technical coordinator of OAPEN, however from 2014 until the end of 2019 only one day per week while working the remaining days of the week at the Employee Insurance Agency (UWV) in the Netherlands as a Data Architect. In 2020, Ronald came back full time to the OAPEN Library and the Directory of Open Access Books as Operations Manager and then later as CTO/Head of Research.

His impact on the infrastructures is immense and no one knows their way around the OAPEN Library as well as Ronald. He has been overseeing and with colleagues developed the technologies that enable OAPEN and DOAB to connect hundreds of publishers with thousands of libraries around the world. Wizarding intricate metadata conversion schemes has indeed been a hallmark of Ronald and colleagues and partners know and respect him for his expertise in this domain. But he is also known for his interest in the impact of publishing academic books open access which has led to many scholarly articles and papers and most notably his PhD dissertation from Leiden University in 2019 published by AUP and of course available in the OAPEN Library (http://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/25287).

Ronald has now decided to make a change in his working life. From October 2025 he will pursue a new role as Enterprise Architect at the National Health Care Institute in the Netherlands. While we regret that Ronald is leaving us, we wish him all the very best in his new role. We will miss him greatly for all his work, support, friendliness, and dry Dutch humour and indeed we thank him deeply for the time and effort he has devoted to OAPEN and DOAB. Ronald’s last working day at OAPEN Foundation will be 29 August 2025.

Ronald leaves OAPEN and DOAB in good shape. We have recently migrated our DSpace environments (the servers) to the CERN Data Centre in Geneva. Our DSpace specialist and programmer, Vaggelis Theodorakopoulos, has been working with us for almost two years and has become fully acquainted with the services and together with the rest of the Tech team, they will ensure that OAPEN and DOAB are in good hands.

Our strategic plans for the coming years (https://www.oapen.org/oapen/oapen-strategic-plan-2025-2028 and https://doabooks.org/en/doab/doab-strategic-plan-2025-2028) together with the recommendations of a report commissioned from the Institute for Data Science at Curtin University in Australia (performing an independent technical review and documentation exercise of the infrastructures) have given us a clear technical roadmap for OAPEN and DOAB.

To steer these developments, we are now hiring a new Head of Technology (see vacancy note) to bring OAPEN and DOAB into the future in close collaboration with a fast-growing and very exciting community around open access publishing of academic books. This marks a next phase for OAPEN and DOAB as we celebrate the 15 years anniversary of the OAPEN Library this year at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Much has happened in the OA books landscape since the launch of the OAPEN Library in 2010. And much has happened to the OAPEN Library. It began with six publishers adding their peer-reviewed OA books to a shared platform – now more than 400 publishers contribute over 40,000 books. New open services for academic books have emerged over the past few years that OAPEN and DOAB are interoperating with. Libraries, publishers, and research funders have new requests that we are responding to or in the process of finding solutions for. OAPEN is engaged in multiple international projects and new directions for OA book publishing, for example Diamond OA book publishing. Etc. etc. The landscape has certainly changed over the past 15 years!

We sometimes jokingly say that OAPEN is an old start-up that has now become a professional organisation. Building on Ronald’s comprehensive contributions over the years we are now taking even further steps to improve the resilience, efficiency, and scalability of OAPEN and DOAB. Exciting times are ahead of us and while we regret that Ronald has chosen not to be part of this journey, we wish him all the best on his new career path and truly thank him for his contributions over the years.

Ronald Snijder standing next to the OAPEN poster at the launch of the OAPEN Library in 2010 at the Frankfurt Book Fair (a rather blurry screen shot, unfortunately, of a recording with my iPhone 3).