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Meet the OAPEN&DOAB Ambassadors An Interview with Alicia Wang DOAB Ambassador for China 

What motivated you to join DOAB as an ambassador?

I want to contribute to the global transition towards open science by advocating for open access books so that more valuable publishing outputs can benefit a broader audience. My commitment to support and promote international scholarly exchange brought me to join CNPIEC, where I oversee projects that foster academic dialogue between China and the world and non-profit or mission-driven initiatives that promote cultural exchange and open dialogue. I have also been deeply inspired by the work of my personal friends and colleagues I have met during work, such as Mr. Shuai Yan (DOAJ ambassador) and Ms. Xiaofeng Guo (Crossref ambassador). Witnessing their enthusiasm and the tangible impact they have had on the Chinese publishing community inspired me to step into this role for DOAB.

How do you plan to drive open access book publishing in your country/region through your work as a DOAB ambassador?

I plan to leverage CNPIEC’s established infrastructure and professional networks to integrate DOAB more deeply into the Chinese scholarly ecosystem. My approach is built around three aspects:

Leveraging international events, like the Beijing International Book Fair (BIBF), to broaden OA impact in China and build new global partnerships:
the Beijing International Book Fair could prove an influential platform to facilitate discussions and networking opportunities with Chinese publishers, with a focus on open access book publishing. These activities will help publishers better understand the global shift towards Open science and the role OA books play within it.

Broaden and deepen institutional outreach in China:
Through close collaboration with domestic academic institutions and research libraries, I will promote DOAB as a trusted discovery resource for researchers, as well as a practical option for institutions interested in developing their own open access book publishing initiatives.

Strategic Integration with OSPC:
CNPIEC serves as the secretariat of the Open Science Promotion Consortium (OSPC) in China. I will actively seek collaboration between DOAB and OSPC, enabling DOAB to stay informed about open access trends and policy developments in China, while simultaneously increasing awareness of DOAB among key Chinese stakeholders.

What or who inspires you in your role?

I am primarily inspired by the “pioneers” of open science in China,  specifically Mr. Shuai Yan and Ms. Ran Dang (representing DOAJ and Crossref respectively). They have shown that an ambassador’s role is not just about representation, but about building a community and facilitating the adoption of international best practices.

What are the biggest challenges you see in advancing open access book publishing in your country/region?

The primary challenge is the current academic evaluation system. In China, the incentive structures for researchers are heavily weighted toward journal articles (specifically those indexed in SCI or Scopus) because they have established “Impact Factors” that are easy to measure.


Books, by nature, have a longer publication cycle and lack a similarly standardised “prestige metric” in the eyes of many evaluation committees. This makes researchers more hesitant to invest time in writing books, let alone Open Access ones. There is a need to shift the mindset from”journal first” to a more holistic view that recognises the unique value of longform publications. Furthermore, the funding models for Book Processing Charges (BPCs) are not yet as mature or widely available as Article Processing Charges (APCs). However, this is a good opportunity to rethink the trajectory for OA books and seek OA paths that are altogether more equitable and inclusive.

I am very much looking forward to working with the DOAB team. I am particularly interested in hearing more about your specific strategic goals for the Chinese region. By aligning our local activities with your global roadmap, we can ensure that Chinese scholarly books are more visible, discoverable, and impactful on the international stage.

认识 OAPEN 与 DOAB 大使:对 DOAB 中国大使 Alicia Wang 的一次访谈

问题一:是什么促使您加入 DOAB 并担任大使?

我希望通过倡导开放获取图书,为全球科学向开放科学的转型有所贡献,让更多有价值的出版成果能够惠及更广泛的读者。正是出于对支持与促进国际学术交流的愿望,我选择加入中国图书进出口(集团)有限公司,负责推动中外学术交流项目,并参与促进文化交流的非营利性或使命驱动型项目。在工作中结识的许多同仁也给予了我很深的影响,例如颜帅先生(DOAJ大使)和郭晓锋女士(Crossref大使)。见证他们对中国学术出版展现的热忱与产生的实际影响,触发我接任DOAB大使这一角色。

问题二:作为DOAB大使,您计划如何通过自己的工作推动您所在国家/地区的开放获取图书出版?

作为DOAB大使,我计划依托中国图书进出口(集团)有限公司的平台和渠道,将DOAB更深入地融入中国学术生态系统。我的工作将围绕以下三个方面展开:

第一,借助国际活动平台扩大开放获取在中国的影响力并建立新的全球合作关系。例如,北京国际图书博览会(BIBF)可作为重要平台,聚焦开放获取图书出版议题,推动与中国出版机构的专题研讨与交流合作。这类活动将帮助出版界更好地理解全球向开放科学的转型趋势,以及开放获取图书在其中扮演的角色。

第二,拓展并深化对中国机构的推广合作。通过与国内学术机构、研究图书馆紧密协作,我将积极推广DOAB,使其成为研究人员信赖的学术资源发现平台,同时也为有意发展开放获取图书出版项目的机构提供切实可行的建议。

第三,推动DOAB加入开放科学促进联合体。作为中国开放科学促进联合体(OSPC)的秘书处单位,中国图书进出口(集团)有限公司将积极促进DOAB与OSPC的合作。此举既能让DOAB及时把握中国开放获取的发展动态与政策走向,也能提升DOAB在中国核心学术群体中的认知度。

问题三:是什么或谁在您的角色中给予您启发?

我主要的动力来源于中国开放科学领域的”开拓者”,特别是颜帅先生和党冉女士(分别代表DOAJ和Crossref)。他们用实际行动表明,大使的职责不仅在于代表一个组织,更在于构建学术共同体,并推动国际最佳实践在本土落地。

问题四:在您所在的国家/地区,您认为推进开放获取图书出版面临的最大挑战是什么?

主要挑战在于现行的学术评价体系。在中国,研究人员的激励机制严重向期刊文章(尤其是被SCI或Scopus收录的论文)倾斜,因为这些期刊拥有易于量化的”影响因子”。而图书的出版周期天然较长,且在许多评审委员会眼中缺乏类似的标准化学术声望评估指标,导致学者对投入时间撰写著作(更不用说开放获取图书)更加犹豫。我们需要推动学术界从”期刊优先”的思维定式,转向更全面地认识图书的独特价值。

此外,图书出版费用(BPC)的资助模式尚未像文章处理费(APC)那样成熟或普及。但这恰恰为我们重新思考开放获取图书的发展路径提供了契机,促使我们探索更公平、更具包容性的开放获取实现方式。

问题五:您还有什么需要补充的吗?

我非常期待与DOAB团队的合作。我尤其希望了解更多针对中国地区的具体战略目标。通过使我们的本地行动与DOAB的全球路线图保持一致,我们可以确保中国学术图书在国际舞台上获得更高的可见度、可发现性和影响力。

Temui Para Duta OAPEN & DOABWawancara dengan Maria Lamury, Duta DOAB untuk Indonesia

Apa motivasi anda untuk bergabung sebagai duta DOAB?

Pada saat saya bekerja sebagai pustakawan, dana untuk pembelian buku cetak atau melanggan platform e-book tidak terlalu besar untuk pengembangan koleksi perpustakaan. Meskipun banyak e-book gratis yang tersedia di internet, kredibilitas pengarang dan penerbit seringkali dipertanyakan. Saya bersyukur dengan adanya mekanisme pengujian kualitas pada DOAB, pengguna di seluruh dunia dapat mengetahui bahwa karya ilmiah yang dikumpulkan dan disebarluaskan dapat dipercaya.

Apa rencana anda untuk mendorong penerbitan buku akses terbuka di negara/wilayah anda dengan bergabung sebagai duta DOAB?

Dengan menjadi duta DOAB, saya dapat membantu pustakawan di negara saya untuk mengakses data yang terpercaya pada buku-buku akses terbuka yang sudah diuji kualitasnya serta mendorong penerbit buku akses terbuka dalam memperbaiki kualitas publikasi dan metadata mereka dengan mendukung DOAB dan pada saat yang bersamaan mendapat manfaat dengan bergabung pada Trusted Platform Network. Pada jangka panjang, bermitra dengan DOAB dapat membangun komunitas buku akses terbuka yang mendukung penerbit dalam mengelola publikasi sesuai dengan standar yang diakui.

Siapa yang menginspirasi anda dalam peranan ini?

Bagi saya, Dr. John Willinsky, tokoh kunci di balik Open Journal Systems (OJS), yang menginspirasi saya dalam peranan ini. Beliau memulai dengan visi yang tulus untuk membuat pengetahuan dapat diakses secara terbuka oleh publik dan kini OJS telah menjadi sistem penerbitan dan pengelolaan jurnal yang paling banyak digunakan di seluruh dunia. Saya sangat beruntung dapat bekerja bersama beliau pada beberapa proyek selama dua tahun terakhir dan telah membuka mata saya terhadap pentingnya berkomitmen terhadap akses terbuka dan konsisten untuk membagikan pengetahuan kepada orang lain.

Apa tantangan terbesar yang anda lihat dalam mengembangkan penerbitan akses terbuka di negara/wilayah anda.

Indonesia adalah pengguna terbesar Open Journal Systems dan banyak jurnal akses terbuka yang secara aktif bersaing untuk dapat diakui sebagai publikasi yang berkualitas, untuk akreditasi nasional dan dapat diindeks di database bibliografis internasional seperti DOAJ. Namun, saya tidak melihat usaha yang sepadan dalam membangun dan mempromosikan buku-buku akses terbuka. Saya percaya bahwa ini adalah kesempatan bagi saya untuk kembali ke ‘akar’ dan bekerja kembali dengan para pustakawan dan penerbit buku akses terbuka untuk meningkatkan kesadaran akan pentingnya pekerjaan DOAB dan untuk mempromosikan cara terbaik guna mendukung penerbitan buku akses terbuka.

Apa ada yang ingin anda tambahkan?

Kontribusi saya mungkin hanya sebuah langkah kecil, tetapi dengan komitmen yang kuat dan usaha bersama dengan komunitas, saya berharap suatu hari nanti Indonesia dapat menjadi penerbit terbesar dari buku-buku akses terbuka di seluruh dunia.

Meet the OAPEN&DOAB Ambassadors An Interview with Maria Lamury DOAB Ambassador for Indonesia 

What motivated you to join DOAB as an ambassador?

When I worked as  librarian, I found it was difficult for the library to get sufficient budget to purchase printed books or subscribe to e-book platforms to enhance our library collections. Although many free e-books are available on the internet, the credibility of their authors and publishers can often be questionable. Thanks to the quality assurance mechanisms DOAB has in place, users around the world know that the scholarly content it aggregates and disseminates can be trusted.

How do you plan to drive open access books publishing in your country/region through your work as a DOAB ambassador?

By becoming a DOAB ambassador, I can help librarians in my region access reliable data on quality-assured OA books and encourage OA book publishers to improve the quality of their publications and metadata by supporting DOAB and at the same time benefitting from joining the Trusted Platform Network. In the long term, in partnership with DOAB, we can establish an OA books community that supports publishers in managing their publications according to recognised standards.

What or who inspires you in your role?

I would say that Dr. John Willinsky, the man behind the Open Journal Systems (OJS),  has been the inspiration for me in this role. He began with a genuine vision to make knowledge freely accessible to the public and now OJS is the world’s most widely used journal management and publishing system. It was an honour to work with him on several projects over the past two years and has opened my eyes to the importance of committing to OA and consistently sharing knowledge with others.

What are the biggest challenges you see in advancing open access book publishing in your country/region?

Indonesia is the largest user of Open Journal Systems and many OA journals actively ‘compete’ to be recognised as qualified publications, aiming for national accreditation and visibility in international bibliographic databases such as DOAJ. However, I do not see the same level of effort on developing and promoting OA books. For this reason, I believe it is an opportunity for me to return to my roots and work closely with librarians and OA book publishers to raise awareness of the important works of DOAB and to promote best practices to support OA books publishing.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

My contribution may be only a small step, but with strong commitment and collective community effort, I hope Indonesia will one day become a leading publisher of open access books in the world.

Meet the OAPEN & DOAB Ambassadors An interview with Ramazan Turgut DOAB Ambassador for Turkey

Ramazan Turgut is a publishing specialist and academic working at the intersection of open science, scholarly communication, and digital research infrastructure. He currently serves as Managing Editor at the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), where he supports the transition of journals to open access and promotes best practices in metadata, publication ethics, and editorial workflows.

What motivated you to join DOAB as an ambassador?

I have spent most of my career helping journals and books from Turkey become visible in international indexes, often starting from national infrastructures such as DergiPark for journals and local university presses for books, and I’ve seen first-hand how transformative that visibility can be for researchers, institutions, and local communities. DOAB plays a unique role in giving open access books a global reach while respecting bibliodiversity and local publishing traditions. For the Turkish open access community, DOAB feels like a natural complement to existing journal infrastructures, because it offers books the same kind of global visibility that many journals already enjoy through platforms like DergiPark. Becoming an ambassador felt like a very natural step: it allows me to bring together my work in DOAJ, my experience with metadata and infrastructure, my long-standing professional commitment to open, equitable access to knowledge and personal passion for books.

How do you plan to drive open access books publishing in your country/region through your work as a DOAB ambassador?

My first priority is to listen to publishers, editors, and librarians in Turkey and understand how to establish a bidirectional and mutually beneficial relationship with DOAB, to drive forward open access books publishing together. Many are interested in open access monographs, but may feel unsure about technical workflows, metadata, or quality criteria. I want to demystify the process: offering webinars and hands-on support in Turkish, helping publishers prepare high-quality metadata, and connecting them with the wider DOAB and OAPEN community. In parallel, I hope to build stronger bridges between institutional presses, university libraries, and global infrastructures such as DOAB, DOAJ, Crossref, and OpenAIRE, so that open access books from Turkey are properly indexed, trusted, and easily discoverable worldwide.

What or who inspires you in your role?

I am constantly inspired by small university presses, librarians, and editors who are committed to open access even when they work with very limited resources. In Turkey, I’ve seen teams build impressive journal and book programmes with almost no dedicated infrastructure, just a strong belief that knowledge should be shared. I’m also inspired by scholars who publish in languages like Turkish, Kurdish or Arabic and still want their work to be part of global conversations. Their efforts to balance local relevance with international visibility motivate me to work on better metadata, multilingual discovery, and more inclusive infrastructures.

What are the biggest challenges you see in advancing open access book publishing in your country/region?

One major challenge in Turkey is the lack of sustainable funding and policy frameworks for open access monographs. Many institutions support open access in principle, but concrete policies, budgets, and workflows for books are only just emerging. In Turkey, most open access journals benefit from the shared national platform DergiPark, but there is not yet a comparable common infrastructure for open access books. I know that TÜBİTAK ULAKBİM is exploring the idea of such a platform. If this materialises, it could be a real game-changer, especially for open access books produced by university presses. A national book platform, if realised, could fill this gap and make it much easier for university presses to publish open access books sustainably, especially in Turkish.

There is also some uncertainty and misunderstanding around quality: authors sometimes worry that publishing an open access book might be seen as “less serious” or “less prestigious”, which is, of course not true. Finally, technical capacity can be a barrier; things like persistent identifiers, XML or high-quality multilingual metadata can feel overwhelming. Part of my role as ambassador is to show that these challenges are solvable, and that infrastructures like DOAB exist precisely to support publishers on this journey.

Anything else you would like to add?

Beyond my ambassador role, I’m involved in a collaborative initiative called “Language Agnostic Knowledge”, which explores how AI and semantic technologies can make non-English research more visible in global infrastructures. For me, this is closely connected to the mission of DOAB: open access only becomes truly meaningful when books are not just free to read, but also easy to find, regardless of the language they are written in. I’m excited to contribute to a future where open access books from Turkey and the wider region are fully part of the international research conversation, on their own terms and in their own languages.

OAPEN & DOAB Elçileriyle Tanışın: Türkiye DOAB Elçisi Ramazan Turgut ile Söyleşi

Ramazan Turgut, açık bilim, akademik iletişim ve dijital araştırma altyapılarının kesişim noktasında çalışan bir yayıncılık uzmanı ve akademisyendir. Hâlen Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)’da Yönetici Editör olarak görev yapmakta; bu kapsamda dergilerin açık erişime geçiş süreçlerini desteklemekte ve metadata, yayın etiği ile editoryal iş akışlarında iyi uygulamaların benimsenmesini teşvik etmektedir.

S1. DOAB’a elçi olarak katılma motivasyonunuz neydi?

Kariyerimin önemli bir bölümünü, Türkiye’de yayımlanan dergi ve kitapların uluslararası dizinlerde görünürlüğünü artırmaya adadım. Bu süreçte çoğu zaman dergiler için DergiPark gibi ulusal altyapılardan, kitaplar için ise üniversite yayınevlerinden yola çıkıldığını gördüm. Bu görünürlüğün araştırmacılar, kurumlar ve yerel topluluklar açısından ne kadar dönüştürücü olabildiğine birebir tanıklık ettim. DOAB, açık erişimli kitaplara küresel ölçekte erişim sağlarken bibliyoçeşitliliğe ve yerel yayıncılık geleneklerine saygı göstermesiyle benzersiz bir rol üstleniyor. Türkiye’deki açık erişim topluluğu açısından DOAB, mevcut dergi altyapılarını doğal bir şekilde tamamlayan bir yapı olarak öne çıkıyor; DOAJ gibi platformlar aracılığıyla dergilerin hâlihazırda sahip olduğu küresel görünürlüğü DOAB kitaplara kazandırıyor. Elçi olmak benim için son derece doğal bir adımdı: DOAJ’daki çalışmalarımı, metadata ve altyapı konusundaki deneyimimi, bilgiye açık ve adil erişime yönelik uzun soluklu mesleki bağlılığımı ve kitaplara duyduğum kişisel tutkuyu bir araya getirme imkânı sunuyor.

S2. DOAB elçisi olarak yürüttüğünüz çalışmalar aracılığıyla ülkenizde/bölgenizde açık erişimli kitap yayıncılığını nasıl geliştirmeyi planlıyorsunuz?

Öncelikli hedefim, Türkiye’deki yayıncıları, editörleri ve kütüphanecileri dinlemek ve DOAB ile çift yönlü, karşılıklı faydaya dayalı bir ilişkiyi nasıl kurabileceğimizi birlikte anlamak. Pek çok paydaş açık erişimli monografilere ilgi duyuyor; ancak teknik iş akışları, metadata ya da kalite kriterleri konusunda tereddüt yaşayabiliyor. Amacım süreci sadeleştirmek ve anlaşılır kılmak: Türkçe webinarlar ve uygulamalı destek sunmak, yayıncıların yüksek kaliteli metadata hazırlamalarına yardımcı olmak ve onları DOAB ve OAPEN topluluğuyla buluşturmak. Buna paralel olarak, kurumsal yayınevleri, üniversite kütüphaneleri ve DOAB, DOAJ, Crossref ve OpenAIRE gibi küresel altyapılar arasında daha güçlü köprüler kurmayı hedefliyorum. Böylece Türkiye’de yayımlanan açık erişimli kitapların doğru şekilde dizinlenmesi, güvenilir bulunması ve dünya genelinde kolayca keşfedilebilir olması mümkün olacaktır.

S3. Bu roldeki çalışmalarınızda size ilham veren kişi veya unsurlar nelerdir?

Sınırlı kaynaklarla çalışmalarına rağmen açık erişime güçlü bir bağlılık gösteren küçük üniversite yayınevleri, kütüphaneciler ve editörler beni sürekli olarak motive ediyor. Türkiye’de, neredeyse hiç özel altyapısı olmayan, ancak bilginin paylaşılması gerektiğine dair güçlü bir inançla etkileyici dergi ve kitap programları oluşturan ekipler gördüm. Ayrıca Türkçe, Kürtçe veya Arapça gibi dillerde yayın yapan ve buna rağmen çalışmalarının küresel akademik tartışmaların bir parçası olmasını isteyen araştırmacılardan da ilham alıyorum. Yerel bağlamı korurken uluslararası görünürlüğü sağlama yönündeki bu çabalar, daha iyi metadata, çok dilli keşif ve daha kapsayıcı altyapılar üzerine çalışmam için beni teşvik ediyor.

S4. Ülkenizde/bölgenizde açık erişimli kitap yayıncılığının gelişmesindeki en büyük zorluklar nelerdir?

Türkiye’deki temel sorunlardan biri, açık erişimli monograflar için sürdürülebilir finansman ve politika çerçevelerinin eksikliğidir. Pek çok kurum açık erişimi ilkesel olarak desteklese de, kitaplara yönelik somut politikalar, bütçeler ve iş akışları henüz yeni yeni oluşmaktadır. Türkiye’de açık erişimli dergilerin büyük çoğunluğu, ulusal ölçekte paylaşılan DergiPark platformundan faydalanmaktadır; ancak açık erişimli kitaplar için henüz benzer bir ortak altyapı bulunmamaktadır. TÜBİTAK ULAKBİM’in bu yönde bir platform fikrini değerlendirdiğini biliyorum. Böyle bir girişimin hayata geçmesi, özellikle üniversite yayınevleri tarafından üretilen açık erişimli kitaplar için oyunun kurallarını değiştirebilir. Ulusal bir kitap platformu, bu boşluğu doldurarak üniversite yayınevlerinin, özellikle Türkçe yayınlar açısından, açık erişimli kitapları sürdürülebilir biçimde yayınlamasını önemli ölçüde kolaylaştırabilir.

Buna ek olarak, kalite konusuna dair bazı belirsizlikler ve yanlış algılar da mevcut. Yazarlar zaman zaman açık erişimli bir kitabın “daha az ciddi” ya da “daha az prestijli” algılanabileceğinden endişe edebiliyor; oysa bunun doğru olmadığı açıktır. Son olarak, teknik kapasite de bir engel oluşturabilmektedir; kalıcı tanımlayıcılar, XML ya da yüksek kaliteli çok dilli metadata gibi unsurlar göz korkutucu görünebilir. Elçi olarak rollerimden biri, bu zorlukların aşılabilir olduğunu ve DOAB gibi altyapıların yayıncıları tam da bu yolculukta desteklemek için var olduğunu göstermek.

S5. Eklemek istediğiniz başka bir husus var mı?

Elçilik rolümün yanı sıra, “Language Agnostic Knowledge” adlı işbirliğine dayalı bir girişimde yer alıyorum. Bu girişim, yapay zekâ ve anlamsal teknolojilerin İngilizce dışındaki araştırmaların küresel altyapılarda daha görünür hâle gelmesine nasıl katkı sağlayabileceğini inceliyor. Bu çalışma, benim için DOAB’ın misyonuyla doğrudan bağlantılıdır: Açık erişim, kitaplar yalnızca ücretsiz okunabilir olmakla kalmayıp, yazıldıkları dilden bağımsız olarak kolayca bulunabildiğinde gerçekten anlam kazanır. Türkiye’den ve daha geniş bölgeden gelen açık erişimli kitapların, kendi koşullarıyla ve kendi dillerinde uluslararası akademik diyaloğun tam anlamıyla bir parçası olduğu bir geleceğe katkı sunmaktan büyük heyecan duyuyorum.

Protecting Stability and Access: How We’re Safeguarding the OAPEN Library and DOAB Against Bot Traffic Surges 

We want to share an important update regarding the temporary access issues that some of our community may have recently experienced on our platforms. We are fully aware of the problem and are working tirelessly to resolve it. 

The Challenge: An Unprecedented Surge in Automated Traffic 

In recent weeks, we have observed a rapid, global increase in traffic generated by automated systems (so-called bots), particularly those associated with large AI language models (LLMs) that are “scraping” the web for content. While this traffic is a testament to the value of our resources, it has repeatedly overwhelmed our infrastructure, hosted by CERN, threatening the stability and availability of the platforms for all users. 

Our Response: Implementing Advanced Protective Measures 

To protect access for researchers, students, and all genuine users, our technical team, in collaboration with engineers at CERN, has deployed a sophisticated, multi-layered traffic management system. 

Part of this strategy involves controlled rate limiting. This means that some users may temporarily encounter a “429 Too Many Requests” error message. 

We want to reassure you: this error does not mean the platform is down or that you are doing anything wrong.  

It is an intentional, temporary defense mechanism to prevent the system from being completely overwhelmed. 

How You Can Help 

  • If you see a 429 error: Please be patient. Wait a short moment and try your request again. In most cases, this is all that is needed. 
  • If the problem is persistent: If you regularly experience this error in a way that hinders your work, please contact us. Your reports are invaluable – they help us fine-tune the security measures to minimize disruption for real users. 

Why This Matters 

The mission of OAPEN and DOAB is to support open science and provide unrestricted access to high-quality academic books. Addressing this technical challenge is crucial to fulfilling this mission. We cannot allow bots to deprive human users of access. 

Thank you for your understanding and support. We are deeply grateful for your patience as we continuously work to improve our infrastructure for the benefit of the entire open science community. 

Introducing Our New Head of Technology, Anna Wałek 

We are thrilled to announce that Dr. Anna Wałek has joined the OAPEN Foundation as our new Head of Technology. Anna brings a unique and powerful combination of strategic vision, deep expertise in open science infrastructure, and a proven ability to lead technological transformation in academia. Her appointment comes at a pivotal time as we move into the implementation phase of our 2025-2028 Strategic Plan, and she will be instrumental in ensuring our technology platform is secure, scalable, and aligned with our community’s needs. 

Anna is a recognised global leader, having recently served as the President of IATUL (International Association of University Libraries). Her extensive experience – from leading digital library transformations at the Gdańsk University of Technology and Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi to contributing to European initiatives such as the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) – provides her with a unique understanding of the challenges and opportunities in open scholarly communication. 

“I was drawn to OAPEN and DOAB because they are not just platforms; they are global public goods and pillars of trust for the open access book ecosystem,” says Anna. “Our strategic plan gives us a clear mandate to ensure our infrastructures are resilient, innovative, and directly support our core mission of promoting bibliodiversity and reducing inequalities. I am excited to collaborate with our team, our hosting partner CERN, other strategic our core partners within the OPERAS research infrastructure and innovative communities like COPIM, and our global community of publishers, libraries, funders and researchers to build a technological foundation that is both robust and transformative.” 

To welcome Anna, we asked her to share her vision for the technological future of OAPEN and DOAB. 

Interview: A Conversation with Dr Anna Wałek, the new Head of Technology at OAPEN and DOAB 

Welcome to the OAPEN and DOAB team! Can you tell us what attracted you most to working here? 

Thank you for the warm welcome! For years, I have admired OAPEN and DOAB. They are not simply platforms – they are fundamental components of the open science infrastructure, enjoying immense trust from the community. My decision to join stemmed from a sense that I could make a real contribution to the development of something that has such a concrete, positive impact on the world of science. Our technological work directly increases the visibility and accessibility of academic books, a mission very close to my heart. 

What are your main technological priorities for the coming months? 

My focus is on three key areas. Firstly, the successful execution of the planned modernisation of our core platform is crucial. This is a strategic investment in our future flexibility, performance, and security. Secondly, I am committed to working with our partners at CERN to enhance further the reliability and integrity of our data and assets. The goal is for our publishers and users to be able to rely entirely on the stability of our services. Thirdly, we will examine our processes, particularly on the deposit side, to identify opportunities to streamline and reduce unnecessary manual work for our publishers. 

Looking a bit further ahead to 2026, what is your technological plan for OAPEN and DOAB

2026 will be an efficient year for us, focused on the user. For OAPEN Library, this means leveraging the new platform’s potential to improve content discovery experiences further. We want navigation and search to be even more intuitive, and the platform itself to be even more user-friendly for readers and researchers worldwide. 

For DOAB, it’s a time to solidify its position as a global, trusted source of OA book metadata. We will focus on ensuring the highest quality and completeness of our data so that libraries and aggregators can use it unconditionally. We will also develop services that transparently communicate book quality, such as PRISM. Finally, we are keen to ensure the synergy between the OAPEN Library and the DOAB catalogue is even smoother and more efficient. A key part of this is deepening our technical collaboration within the OPERAS research infrastructure and with key community partners like OASPA and LIBER. We are stronger when our systems work seamlessly together. 

How do you intend to align technological development with the goals set out in the OAPEN 2025-2028 Strategy? 

In my view, technology and strategy are inextricably linked. The strategy sets our directions, such as supporting bibliodiversity or reducing inequalities in scholarly communication, and technology provides the tools to achieve these goals. 

For instance, by investing in modern, stable infrastructure, we build the trust necessary for publishers from around the world to collaborate with us long-term. By automating processes, we not only increase our efficiency but also lower barriers to entry for smaller publishers that may not have extensive administrative resources. This is a very concrete manifestation of our commitment to diversity. And by refining our APIs and metadata services, we actively support the global open science ecosystem, facilitating integration and content reuse. Our active participation in OPERAS and collaboration with global initiatives like SCOSS and IOI ensures our technical roadmap is informed by and contributes to the broader open science landscape. Every technical decision is thus evaluated based on its impact on our strategic objectives. 

Finally, what is your most significant source of inspiration in this new role? 

Without hesitation – the people and the shared mission. I am surrounded by a team full of passion and dedication, and our community of publishers and librarians truly believes in the purpose of what we do. The technology we develop serves a very human purpose: making high-quality knowledge accessible to anyone who needs it. 

To have a real, positive impact on the world of science, while working on such fundamental platforms – that is what gives deep meaning to my work. I am tremendously motivated by the vision of what we can achieve together for the benefit of the entire academic community. Knowing that we are part of a larger, collaborative effort with partners across Europe and beyond makes this work even more inspiring. 

OAPEN and DOAB at the Open Access Tage 2025

We were delighted to participate in the OA-Tage 2025 in Konstanz in September. The energy, commitment and level of engagement from everyone present was truly inspiring. Together with the German speaking open access community, we addressed the practical needs of publishers and how we can collectively improve the systems and practices of open scholarly communication.

We had the pleasure of connecting with colleagues from Verfassungsblog, SeDOA, the German Open Access Network, AG Universitätsverlage and many others. These conversations were rich in perspectives and ideas, offering fertile ground for collaboration and shared innovation to support open access book publishing.

The workshop we co-hosted with colleagues from Copim Open Book Futures and AG Universitätsverlage focused on scaling small through horizontal collaboration, rooted in open values and interoperable infrastructures. Together we examined workflows that support community-led OA book publishing – covering everything from collective funding schemes (Open Book Collective and Opening the Future) and open metadata (via Thoth) to discoverability and archiving (with DOAB and OAPEN). Thanks to all who supported the workshop – Marco Winkler, Maxi Kindling, Bernhard Schubert, Elisabeth Stadler, Oliver Krüger, Joe Deville, Kevin Sanders, Kira Hopkins and Toby Steiner – as well as the participants who brought such thoughtful reflections to it.

Exercise from the workshop

The keynote presentations distilled some of the central challenges and opportunities in the open access landscape. Pierre Mounier reminded us that we – the community – derive empowerment as agents in serving that very community. He argued against isolation from existing systems – and rather than adopting their logic, or merely mirror them, we should instead redirect them towards our shared goals. In this way, efficient, sustainable and equitable systems can be fostered and supported through community-led approaches.

In many talks and conversations across the days, including in the keynote by Marco Tullney,  it was stressed how there can be no open access without open infrastructure: It is important to build, support and sustainably fund community-governed open infrastructure to ensure that scholarly publishing becomes truly open, equitable and not least independent of commercial control. 

It was great to meet institutions who, despite increasing financial pressures, continue to support us and other open infrastructures, setting a clear example of the kind of shared responsibility and long-term vision that open access demands. Supporting open infrastructures is a commitment to a more equitable, transparent and credible scholarly communication system. We work daily to deepen our collaboration with open access communities around the world to ensure a more resilient and inclusive future for open access.

We are very grateful to all who helped make OA-Tage 2025 such a vibrant, meaningful event  – including the organisers and everyone who shared their ideas and time with us.

We look forward to continuing these conversations – and to seeing you all in Linz next year!

The Bodensee in Konstanz

OAPEN and DOAB at the Open Access Tage 2025

Wir haben uns sehr gefreut, letzte Woche an den OA-Tagen 2025 in Konstanz teilzunehmen. Die Energie, das Engagement und die Beteiligung aller Anwesenden waren wirklich inspirierend. Gemeinsam mit der deutschsprachigen Open-Access-Community haben wir uns mit den praktischen Bedürfnissen von Verlagen befasst und darüber diskutiert, wie wir gemeinsam die strukturellen Grundlagen der offenen, wissenschaftlichen Kommunikation in eine bessere Richtung bewegen können.

Es war uns eine Freude, uns mit Kolleg:innen von Verfassungsblog, SeDOA, dem Deutschen Open-Access-Netzwerk, der AG Universitätsverlage und vielen weiteren auszutauschen. Diese Gespräche waren reich an Perspektiven und Ideen und boten fruchtbaren Boden für Zusammenarbeit und gemeinsame Innovationen zur Unterstützung des Open-Access-Buchverlagswesens.

Der Workshop, den wir gemeinsam mit Kolleg:innen von Copim Open Book Futures und der AG Universitätsverlage veranstalteten, stand unter dem Motto „Scaling small through horizontal collaboration“, verankert in offenen Werten und interoperablen Infrastrukturen. Gemeinsam untersuchten wir Workflows, die gemeinschaftsgeleitetes Open-Access-Buchpublizieren unterstützen – von kollektiven Finanzierungsmodellen (Open Book Collective und Opening the Future) über offene Metadaten (via Thoth) bis hin zu Auffindbarkeit und Archivierung (mit DOAB und OAPEN). Unser Dank gilt allen, die den Workshop unterstützt haben – Marco Winkler, Maxi Kindling, Bernhard Schubert, Elisabeth Stadler, Oliver Krüger, Joe Deville, Kevin Sanders, Kira Hopkins und Toby Steiner – ebenso wie den Teilnehmenden, die so wertvolle Reflexionen eingebracht haben.

Exercise from the workshop

Die Keynotes fassten einige der zentralen Herausforderungen und Chancen in der Open-Access-Landschaft zusammen. Pierre Mounier erinnerte uns daran, dass wir – die Community – unsere Stärke daraus ziehen, dieser Community als handelnde Akteur:innen zu dienen. Er sprach sich gegen eine Abschottung von bestehenden Systemen aus – und plädierte dafür, diese nicht einfach zu übernehmen oder zu spiegeln, sondern sie in Richtung unserer gemeinsamen Ziele umzulenken. Auf diese Weise können effiziente, nachhaltige und gerechte Systeme durch gemeinschaftsgeleitete Ansätze gefördert und unterstützt werden.

In einer weiteren Keynote machte Marco Tullney eindrücklich deutlich, dass es kein Open Access ohne offene Infrastrukturen geben kann: Die kritischen Infrastrukturen, die Open Access ermöglichen, müssen kontinuierlich und gemeinschaftlich unterstützt werden.

Besonders ermutigend war es, Institutionen zu treffen, die trotz steigender finanzieller Belastungen weiterhin uns und andere offene Infrastrukturen unterstützen – und damit ein klares Beispiel für die Art geteilter Verantwortung und langfristiger Perspektive setzen, die Open Access erfordert. Die Unterstützung offener Infrastrukturen ist ein Bekenntnis zu einem gerechteren, transparenteren und glaubwürdigeren System wissenschaftlicher Kommunikation. Wir arbeiten täglich daran, unsere Zusammenarbeit mit Open-Access-Communities weltweit zu vertiefen, um eine resilientere und inklusivere Zukunft für Open Access zu gewährleisten.

Wir sind allen sehr dankbar, die dazu beigetragen haben, dass die OA-Tage 2025 ein so lebendiges und bedeutungsvolles Ereignis waren – einschließlich der Organisator:innen und aller, die ihre Ideen und ihre Zeit mit uns geteilt haben.

Wir freuen uns darauf, diese Gespräche fortzusetzen – und Sie alle im nächsten Jahr in Linz wiederzusehen!

The Bodensee in Konstanz

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).

Funnelling locusts – further reflections on the OAPEN Library and DOAB’s response time 

In my previous post on our less than optimal performance of the OAPEN Library and DOAB, I wrote about the effect of AI bots on our systems, and that it has become a common problem for many sites providing open access (OA) or open source software content. All of them – including the OAPEN Library and DOAB – see a new threat: not censorship or budget cuts, but bots. A new kind of digital swarm has arrived, and it’s putting serious pressure on our infrastructure, especially the OAPEN Library. In this blog, I will discuss in some detail our ongoing work to prevent us from being overrun by AI bots. 

Interacting with OAPEN and DOAB – a dialogue 

At its core, every interaction with the OAPEN Library is a dialogue between a user and our server. A request is made, we respond. This simple back-and-forth happens countless times a day. A user is either a person, or an automated system: a bot.  

Most of the time, these interactions are respectful. Many bots—like those from Google or CLOCKSS—identify themselves and behave in a predictable way. We welcome not just human users, but also automated systems – for instance for text and data mining – into the OAPEN Library; we aim to share a quality-controlled collection of open access books as widely as possible.  

But with the rise of AI tools—especially large language models (LLMs)—the nature of these conversations is changing. Many bots no longer introduce themselves. They mask their identities and arrive in droves, flooding the system with requests. 

OAPEN under attack: a swarm of locusts 

Under normal circumstances, we see less than 50 dialogues per second happening between a user and the OAPEN Library. However, when a swarm of AI bots starts hammering the OAPEN server, the number of interactions rises to over 10,000. As you can imagine, this is similar to undergoing a swarm of locusts. 

These swarms of AI bots are scraping content to feed LLMs. The impact? Our response time balloons from milliseconds to minutes, effectively making the OAPEN Library unusable. And it doesn’t stop. These surges can last for hours and sometimes occur multiple times a day. 

Figure 1: Line drawing of locusts, taken from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Diagrams_of_Locusts_which_swarmed_over_England_in_1748.jpg  

Our solutions to the problem 

Stopping this digital onslaught is far from simple. The attacks don’t come from a single source or follow an obvious pattern. As an open infrastructure serving a global audience, we cannot block entire countries, as some may have done as a solution. Our goal is to make sure that all genuine users of the OAPEN Library continue to have access, and to funnel the flood of AI bots. Together with our colleagues of the CERN Data Center we have been working on several countermeasures. 

What measures have we implemented? 

  1. Blocking known offenders 

We keep a list of bots that have repeatedly overwhelmed the system and block them. While many bots disguise themselves, some of them are still recognisable. 

  1. Rate limiting 

When a user is sending more than a certain number of requests per seconds, we temporary block them. Our OAPEN Library server does not respond with an answer or by sending a file but instead gives the message “429 Too Many Requests”. 

We are applying the following limitations to handle these instances: 

  • More than 40 requests in 10 seconds for a URL starting with /discover or /handle will lead to a time-out. 
  • More than 20 requests in 10 seconds for a URL starting with /bitstream will lead to a time-out.  

If this results in genuine users being blocked from using the OAPEN Library, such as large institutions, we will recosider changing the limits. 

  1. Separating file downloads from information requests 

The most important function of the OAPEN Library is providing access to OA book and chapter files. To ensure that they remain accessible, requests for files are now redirected to four separate servers to manage file downloads. This helps us deal with the large number of file requests, as there are now more servers to carry the load. 

  1. Continuous monitoring 

Additional to all the above measures, in collaboration with our colleagues from the CERN Data Center, we will continue to closely watch traffic to the OAPEN Library and adjust our responses as needed. 

Figure 2 An overview of response times of several aspects of the OAPEN Library 

Looking Ahead 

There is no silver bullet. Combating this problem requires significant time, technical resources, and coordination between our team and the CERN Data Center. On the horizon, a newer version of DSpace promises greater flexibility and tools to help manage these issues more effectively. Our current version of DSpace uses a relatively old version of the SOLR search engine and it is not possible to add an additional copy of the search engine to double the capacity. The latest versions of DSpace are using an updated version of SOLR, making it possible to add more capacity.  

Until then, we continue to do all we can to keep the OAPEN Library open and accessible – for humans and well-behaved bots alike – to avoid sincere users being harmed by these solutions. However, if you run into issues, please contact us

What are our strategic priorities in 2025? 

OAPEN, an open infrastructure for open access (OA) books, provides services to stakeholders in scholarly communications, namely, publishers, funders, libraries, and researchers. Our vision is for all scholarly books to be shared and distributed openly and fairly for the collective benefit of humanity. Our mission is to maintain and develop the OAPEN Library and related open infrastructure services for peer-reviewed scholarly books, open textbooks, and OER to our stakeholders for the benefit of the public at large.  

We want to share some of our strategic priorities for 2025 from the eight goals outlined in our 2025-2028 Strategic Plan and the most immediate next steps we will take towards achieving them. For easier reading, we have split the post into two different sections, ‘Community’ and ‘Technical’, which also reflects the internal focuses within the organisation.  

Community 

Several of our goals revolve around equity and diversity of distribution of OA books globally. We want to provide any OA book publisher (and therefore any researchers), no matter where they are located, with equal opportunity for their books to be discovered, downloaded, read, and cited, while maintaining the quality expected of the OAPEN Library and DOAB. This will primarily involve lots of outreach to publishers and libraries in new or less well-represented parts of the world, such as Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. 

DOAB in Africa, a small-scale internal project started in 2024, is one way we will continue to support African publishers to address their equitable access to OA distribution channels. Similarly, the ALMASI project (Aligning and Mutualizing Nonprofit Open Access Publishing Services Internationally) which we are also involved in and launched in January 2025 for a period of three years, goes further by spanning three regions: Africa, Europe, and Latin America.  The project’s aim is to understand the current landscape of nonprofit OA publishing and co-design and align measures for quality standards, training resources, and institutional and national policy development. 

As well as being involved in projects and doing our own outreach, an important part of achieving an equitable and diverse scholarly book publishing ecosystem will be to work closely with our current partners (OPERAS, Copim, PKP, CERN, the SCOSS network, and more)  while also forming new partnerships to support achieving these goals. The Forum for Open Research in the Middle East (FORM), is one such organisation, of whom we recently became an Open Science Supporter. We will be hosting a workshop for their members later in the year and plan to be present at their Annual Forum which always takes place in a different Arab state in October. 

OAPEN and DOAB are often present and speak at at relevant conferences throughout the year, and 2025 will be no different. View our post about in-person conference attendance for where to find us and make sure to check back for updates as the year progresses. 

As well as engaging partners and at conferences, we are starting an ambassador’s programme for DOAB to raise awareness of our services, OA books, for knowledge exchange, and to broaden our networks, as well as those of our ambassadors. We’re currently in talks with several candidates and hope to announce these very soon.  

While the PALOMERA (Policy Alignment of Open Access Monographs in the European Research Area) project formally ended in December 2024, its achievements remain relevant, and progress made throughout the project should not be discarded. Continuing to operate and promote the OAPEN OA Books Toolkit, as well as the Knowledge Base that developed alongside PALOMERA, will be a focal point for the year, and the Open Access Books Network (of which OAPEN is one of the three coordinators) and new OPERAS OA Books Special Interest Group (SIG), will be a partner in this. The Funder Forum will become the Policy Forum and is going to be hosted by Science Europe, with cOAlition S and OAPEN contributing, so stay tuned for more updates on this throughout the year. 

Technical 

Our stakeholders and users are integral to our existence, and we want to continue to meet their needs and guarantee a first-class user experience. Alongside aesthetic changes such as a rebrand, we will be conducting a complete technical review of our services for the first time. The Curtain Institute for Data Science at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, will be performing this review and we hope to publish the results after it’s done. A technical audit is essential to ensure that we can maintain a robust and reliable service for all globally.  

As the migration to CERN is complete, we will be working closely with them to maintain our servers and deliver a reliable service to our users. Additionally, we will be expanding our existing suite of services, adding a privacy-friendly recommender tool to the OAPEN Library, integrating VIAF (Virtual International Authority File) into our metadata to provide author affiliation data, and upgrading to a new DSpace environment (the OAPEN Library and DOAB currently operate on DSpace 6).  

Finally, we will do another POSI update in May, reviewing our progress since we first conducted self-audits in May 2023 (when we first adopted POSI). POSI stands for the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, and they serve as a guide for open infrastructures such as OAPEN to ensure they are run and sustained in a way that accountable to the community we serve and remain open and transparent about our operations.  

Feel free to get in touch with us if you have any questions or comments.  

Download and read the OAPEN Strategic Plan 2025 – 2028.

Read the DOAB Strategic Plan 2025 – 2028.  

Computers gung ho? Responding to the OAPEN Library and DOAB’s response time 

The catchphrase ‘computer says no‘ is something most of us are familiar with; it’s frustrating when an digital system is not behaving the way we want. Lately, at OAPEN and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) we are experiencing something else that might be described as ‘computers gung ho’.  

What was the problem? 

The OAPEN Library and DOAB received so many requests from automated systems that they drowned out genuine users. On Tuesday 25 March, the problem reached a tipping point for the OAPEN Library when we saw this happening for several hours. From 8:30 up until 12:00 the number of sessions on the OAPEN Library exploded from 15 per second to 1,500 per second. As a result, the average response time of the OAPEN Library dropped from 0.2 seconds to 1.2 minutes, rendering the service unusable. Thanks to the support of our hosting partner CERN, the system did not crash. 

A graph showing the averag number of session oand the average response time of OAPEn and DOAB

Image: A graph showing activity in the OAPEN Library (green line) and DOAB (yellow line) on Tuesday 25 March. Credit: Grafana Dashboard, provided by CERN. 

If you look closely at the graph, you can see that these peaks in sessions were not confined to one morning only. We now see this happening several times per day, but only for short periods. 

Why is this happening? 

The reason for these bursts is that AI systems are hoovering up the content in the OAPEN Library and DOAB. OAPEN and DOAB are not the only websites that need to deal with these type of visitors. Eric Hellman describes in his blog “AI bots are destroying Open Access” how this has become a problem for many providers of open access content. When your mission is to make knowledge as widely available as possible, blocking AI bots should not be a necessity. This leads to unintended consequences, for example, the Internet Archive can no longer save snapshots of MIT Press because of Cloudflare blocking. The problem is not confined to open access providers, but also those who work on open source software see the same thing happening

What can be done about it? 

Our goal is to continue providing unfettered access to a quality curated collection of open access books. There is no simple solution: the requests come from different addresses and mostly do not identify as bots. This makes it hard for us – and all others dealing with this issue – to distinguish between genuine users and AI tools ‘gung ho’.  

Together with our colleagues at CERN we are working on the resilience of our systems, to make sure they keep functioning. We are also investigating if there is a way to deal with the peaks in downloads in such a way that it will allow human readers to keep using the OAPEN Library and DOAB without interruptions.  

While we keep working on a solution, we thank you for your continued patience when our services are temporarily slower than usual. 

Equitable and sustainable open access for scholarly books in East Africa: report from an online session

This is a guest post written by Malavika Legge, Program Manager at OASPA.

In October 2024, a collaborative online-session for publishers from East Africa was co-organised by the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and OAPEN, along with the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA), and French research institutes in Africa (LAM and IFRA) supported by the  National Centre for Scientific Research in France (CNRS).

The session covered approaches towards equitable and sustainable open access (OA) for scholarly books, and this online event, held on 24 October 2024, was delivered in two parts: Part 1 was a webinar-style series of presentations exploring impacts, experiences, revenue models and other topics pertaining to OA book publishing. Part 2 was a workshop-style discussion for all present.

The co-organisers of this 2-part event are pleased to share this detailed report as well as a freely available video recording of the four presentations, outlined below. 

Part 1: General Session – Moderator: Mary Felix, General Manager, OAPEN
Watch Mary’s introduction and opening remarks at the start of the recording.

  1. Findings and experiences about publishing Open access books in African Studies
  • Bastien Miraucourt (CNRS, France) 
  • Watch Bastien’s presentation from minute 7 onwards in the recording
  1. About some successful open access books funding models
  • Judith Fathallah (Coventry University, Lancaster University, Open Book Collective, United Kingdom) 
  • Watch Judith from 23 minutes 30 seconds onwards in the recording
  1. Integrating digital outputs and open access in the business development of an academic book publisher in Africa
  • Andrew Joseph (Wits University Press, South Africa)
  • Watch Andrew from 34 minutes 15 seconds onwards on the recording
  1. Early results of an African institutional publisher’s global transition to Open Access
  • Jill Claassen (University of Cape Town, South Africa)
  • Watch Jill’s presentation from minute 47 onwards on the recording

Part 2 – workshop discussion

This section of the event was not recorded, and it gave space for audience Q&A, discussion and interactions. All who were present, including East African book publishers in attendance, were welcomed to share experiences and participate. 
Part 2 of the event was moderated by our guest facilitator – Juma Joseph Musakali of Moi University, Kenya. Some headlines emerging from the discussion are distilled in the ‘connections and conversations’ section of our full report.