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Guest post: SCOAP3 for Books Program 2025

This is a guest post written by the SCOAP3 Team, mirrored on the SCOAP3 website.

The SCOAP3 for books program aims to support the open access (OA) publishing of new  (“born-OA”) scientific monographs and textbooks that are relevant to the discipline of high energy physics (i.e. in the field of Physics, Mathematics, Engineering, Instrumentation or Computer Science as related to the high-energy physics community). 

Supported by contributions from members of the SCOAP3 Consortium, the program has funded the Open Access publishing of almost 100 books to date (see the SCOAP3 Collection in the OAPEN Library)

SCOAP3 now launches the 2025 program and invites all interested scholarly publishers to participate. 

If you wish to participate in this program in 2025, we invite you to submit proposals for Open Access funding for books relevant to high energy physics that are planned to be published in the years 2025 and 2026, via the online form linked here.

Please fill one form per book, before May 15th, 2025. All the submitted books should already have been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication within the next 18 months, and should be accompanied with a significant amount of sample text (at least one chapter). 

In addition, it is mandatory that the prior consent of authors for OA publishing be obtained for each proposed title (using either CC-BY or CC-BY-NC license), together with their acknowledgement of the publication timelines required by the program (Publication should happen at the latest by December, 31st, 2026). 

Proposals will be subject to an evaluation by a panel of scientists in the field, who will make the final selection.. 

We aim to complete the selection process and inform publishers of the titles that have been successfully selected for funding by October 1st 2025. (Please note that books published before this date will not be eligible for SCOAP3 funding).In case of questions, or problems when filling the form, please contact us: scoap3@cern.ch.

About SCOAP3

SCOAP3 (The Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics: Enabling open dissemination of global research outputs in High-Energy Physics) is a global partnership—consisting of over three thousand libraries, key funding agencies and research centers from some 50 partnering countries and intergovernmental organisations—with a mission to enable barrier-free, equitable Open Access to research in High-Energy Physics.

OAPEN & SCOAP3

Since 2021, OAPEN has supported SCOAP³ for Books by providing services in the areas of hosting, dissemination, digital preservation, analytics as well as a branded collection. The SCOAP3 for Books collection consists of key textbooks and monographs in particle physics and neighboring fields which have been converted to Open Access through partnership with leading scientific publishers. SCOAP3 is funded through the generous support of members of over 200 members of the consortium. Learn more about SCOAP3 for Books.

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.

Migrating the OAPEN Library and DOAB to CERN

This week, we will be migrating the OAPEN Library and Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) servers from their current provider to CERN’s Data Center (as announced earlier this year). This move will improve the operational reliability and efficiency of services for the OAPEN Library and DOAB. 

At the same time, we are removing the EGI authentication for publishers from DOAB. As a result, participating publishers will need to request a new password when logging into DOAB.  

Timeline of events for the migration

  • On Tuesday 10 December, we will restrict updating access for publishers on DOAB, and we will pause adding new titles to the OAPEN Library. 
  • From Wednesday 11 December until Friday 13 December, we will be migrating the OAPEN Library and DOAB to the CERN Data Center. During this time, there might be a short disruption of availability to these services.  
    • We will copy the remaining data from the old to the new environment.
    • Once this operation has been completed, we will perform a final check.  
    • When the inspection proves to be successful, the web addresses https://library.oapen.org and https://directory.doabooks.org will be redirected to the new environments at the CERN Data Center. 
  • From Friday 13 December onwards, the OAPEN Library and DOAB will once again become available for updates. 

DOAB: removal of the EGI authentication 

Removing the EGI authentication service from DOAB will simplify our login process for participating publishers. Instead of the EGI authentication, publisher access to DOAB will be based on a combination of email address and password. A one-time update of the password will be required. This can be done by simply requesting a new password when logging into DOAB.

What does this mean for publishers hosting titles on OAPEN and/or participating in DOAB? 

If you are a publisher, you will not be able to add new titles or update existing titles to the OAPEN Library or DOAB between 11 December and 13 December. For those publishers participating in DOAB, they will need to request a new password when logging in as the EGI authentication will be removed.

For everyone else, you can continue to use the OAPEN Library and DOAB as usual but there may be some periods of time when the services are unavailable. We will try to keep these periods of unavailability as short as possible. 


We thank you for your continued patience with us while we navigate to our new service provider and look forward to completing migration. Please contact us with any questions.  

Strong Foundations for The Palace Project: A collaboration between OAPEN and Lyrasis

OAPEN and Lyrasis build greater access to digital content using the Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS) standard to create interoperability between content providers and reading applications.

The Hague, Netherlands, 9 December 2024 – OAPEN and Lyrasis are happy to announce the implementation and integration of the OAPEN Library collection with The Palace Project. Through this joint effort, more than 22,000 open access books have been made available through OAPEN’s Metadata Export Module for Open Access books (MEMO). This open source metadata management and integration tool by OAPEN invests in the principle of open and interoperable community owned infrastructure and is built on open standards and licensing of content. 

Ronald Snijder, CTO and Head of Research at OAPEN says, “I am very happy that our collection of peer-reviewed open access books is also available to The Palace Project users. We think it is important that our collection can be accessed through a platform like the Palace eReader App that is open and easy to use and that also reaches audiences beyond academia.”

Using OPDS, content providers have a simple and easy-to-implement tool to open discovery and access to other applications and reading systems. Because The Palace Project makes extensive use of OPDS with commercially licensed and openly licensed providers, OAPEN joins a growing global network of content providers invested in creating seamless access to content to readers, researchers, and scholars.   

“NYU Libraries is thrilled that OAPEN is now offering OPDS feeds through their MEMO service,” Nancy Lin, Senior Data Project Strategist at NYU Libraries tells us, “Using this open standard feed, Lyrasis was able to instantly integrate over 22,000 open access ebooks into NYU’s Palace eReader App.” 

James English, Director of Business Development at Lyrasis says, “We are excited to partner with OAPEN to expand access to their ebook collections and publisher content via the Palace App. We hope to broaden adoption and use of this valuable collection of knowledge and information in support of the open access publishing movement as The Palace Project and Lyrasis. I am particularly excited about OAPEN’s use of the OPDS standard in this integration as part of a growing movement toward creating an open and interoperable infrastructure for digital content in libraries.”

Libraries interested in learning more about this integration and how they can improve access to Open Access ebooks can reach out to info@thepalaceproject.org or info@oapen.org

Libraries interested in learning more about this integration and how they can improve access to Open Access ebooks can reach out to info@thepalaceproject.org or info@oapen.org

About Lyrasis

Lyrasis is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit membership organization whose mission is to support enduring access to the world’s shared academic, scientific and cultural heritage through leadership in open technologies, content services, digital solutions and collaboration with archives, libraries, museums and knowledge communities worldwide.The Palace Project is a program of Lyrasis working in strategic partnership with Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).

About The Palace Project

The Palace Project is a suite of content, applications and services for the delivery of ebooks, audiobooks, and other digital media to benefit libraries and their patrons. The Palace Project operates out of the Ebooks and Community Engagement Division of Lyrasis.   

About OAPEN

The OAPEN Foundation is an independent, not-for-profit organisation dedicated to peer-reviewed open access books. OAPEN operates three platforms: the OAPEN Library, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB, in partnership with OpenEdition) and the OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit. OAPEN promotes and supports the global transition to open access for academic books by providing open infrastructure services to stakeholders in scholarly communication.

An Interview with the University of Oxford, Bodleian Libraries

The Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford recently became a premium OAPEN Library and DOAB supporter. Silke Davison, Community Manager, interviewed David Watson, the Bodleian’s open monograph project officer about their engagement with OA books and why they chose to become one of our supporters. Read on to find out what they had to say below!

You recently became a premium OAPEN Library and DOAB supporter, can you tell us your motivations behind this decision? 

Our decision to become a premium supporter of OAPEN Library and DOAB was driven by our commitment to the open access (OA) movement and our desire to ensure the widest possible sustainable access to research outputs including longform works. The Bodleian Libraries have a long history of supporting academic research, and we believe that open access is a vital component in the future of academic publishing. By partnering with OAPEN and DOAB, we hope to contribute to the growth and sustainability of open access publishing, particularly in the area of academic books. 

What are you looking forward to most about this collaboration? 

We are particularly excited about the opportunities this collaboration offers for enhancing the discoverability of OA books. Through our support, we hope to assist OAPEN and DOAB in expanding their platforms, making it easier for researchers and the public to access high-quality scholarly content. Additionally, we look forward to engaging with the broader OA community, sharing best practices, and contributing to the ongoing dialogue about the future of open access. This partnership also aligns with our goals of fostering innovation in research and ensuring that research is accessible to a global audience. 

How do you see this collaboration benefiting your institution? 

We see multiple benefits stemming from this collaboration. For the Bodleian Libraries, it strengthens our role in the open access movement, demonstrating our commitment to ensuring the widest possible access to research outputs. For our researchers and students, this partnership enhances access to a broader range of high-quality OA books, which is particularly valuable in an era where digital resources are increasingly vital for academic success. The OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit (https://www.oabooks-toolkit.org/) is an extremely helpful resource for authors looking at publishing their books OA – which is a task we know can be daunting and confusing. 

How have the Bodleian Libraries responded to the rise of open monograph publication?

The Bodleian has recognized the significant impact that the rise of open monograph publication will have on Oxford’s academics and researchers, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. It also acknowledges the financial implications that the libraries must address. In response, the Bodleian Libraries launched the Sustainable Open Monograph Project to explore how best to navigate these changes, especially in light of the UKRI’s longform policy. The project has examined Oxford’s publishing landscape for OA books, raised awareness among academics about relevant policies, created an Open Book Collection within the institutional repository – ORA (Oxford University Research Archive), and supported OA book schemes, publishers, and infrastructure, all with the goal of fostering sustainable open access and promoting bibliodiversity.

A key focus of our efforts has been improving the availability of information about OA books to our academic community, helping to dispel misconceptions and build confidence in OA publishing. We have published several case studies featuring Oxford authors who have successfully published OA books, each highlighting different aspects of the OA publishing experience. In addition, we developed an author checklist that outlines the OA publishing process, offering practical guidance to authors considering open access for their monographs.

How do you see OA books developing in the next five years? 

In the next five years, we anticipate significant growth in the adoption and production of OA books.  As academic institutions, funders, and publishers increasingly recognize the value of open access – and with an open access requirement for submission of longform outputs confirmed for the REF exercise after REF 2029, we expect to see a broader range of disciplines embracing OA book publishing, especially in the humanities. Sustainable OA infrastructure will likely play a key role in this evolution, with improved platforms and tools making it easier to publish, discover, and interact with OA books. We also expect greater collaboration between libraries, publishers, and OA initiatives, with yet more innovative funding models and schemes. Ultimately, we believe that OA books will become a standard part of the academic publishing landscape – though there will be many within academia who will need to be convinced that OA is an opportunity, and not simply a burden. 

About the Bodleian Libraries

The Bodleian Libraries is the library service supporting the University of Oxford.

The mission of the Bodleian Libraries is to provide an excellent service to support the learning, teaching and research objectives of the University of Oxford; and to develop and maintain access to Oxford’s unique collections for the benefit of scholarship and society.

Libraries in the Bodleian Libraries group include the principal University library – the Bodleian Library – which has been a library of legal deposit for 400 years; as well as 25 other libraries across Oxford, including major research libraries and faculty, department and institute libraries.

The Bodleian Libraries is now the largest academic library service in the UK and one of the largest library services in Europe. The Bodleian Libraries administer the University of Oxford’s institutional repository, ORA (Oxford University Research Archive), preserving and making accessible OA research produced by the members of Oxford University, including articles, research data, research theses, and longform works.

Together, the Libraries hold more than 13 million printed items, over 80,000 e-journals and outstanding special collections including rare books and manuscripts, classical papyri, maps, music, art and printed ephemera.

About OAPEN and DOAB

The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) is a globally used, community-driven and open directory that indexes high quality peer-reviewed open access books. The primary mission of DOAB is to increase discoverability of open access books and increase trust in open access book publishing. All DOAB services are free of charge and all data is freely available.

The OAPEN Foundation is an independent, not-for-profit organisation dedicated to peer-reviewed open access books. OAPEN operates three platforms: the OAPEN Library, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB, in partnership with OpenEdition), and the OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit. OAPEN promotes and supports the global transition to open access for academic books by providing open infrastructure services to stakeholders in scholarly communication.

Preserving Knowledge: The Power of Collaboration between OAPEN Foundation and CLOCKSS

by Gali Halevi, Collections Director for the CLOCKSS archive and Ronald Snijder, CTO and Head of Research at OAPEN

In the digital age, ensuring the long-term preservation and accessibility of academic and scholarly books is more crucial than ever. Partnership between CLOCKSS and the OAPEN Foundation is proving crucial.

The partnership began in 2022 when CLOCKSS, DOAB and the OAPEN Library commissioned research from Mikael Laakso[1]. Utilizing open bibliometric data sources, this study answered three questions: 1) How prevalent are OA books, 2) what web domains are responsible for offering full-text access to these OA books, and 3) to what degree can OA books be verified to be archived in trusted preservation services. Of 396 995 unique OA book records only 19% were found to be included in at least one preservation service. The results caused alarm and concern for the long tail of OA books. Read more here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7305489 .

Action required! CLOCKSS and the OAPEN Library to the rescue!

In partnership we have connected our services to safeguard valuable longform scholarship. This collaboration has been particularly powerful for smaller publishers who often lack the resources to independently secure the future of their publications. For this reason, we have concentrated on publishers that have added a small number of books available in the OAPEN Library. This group is actually quite large: we identified 164 publishers that fall within this category.

However, this is not the only thing that has come out of our cooperation. We also prepared the OAPEN Library to comply with the requirements for preservation in the Global LOCKSS Network (GLN). All book records in the Library contain a machine readable description of the licence. The GLN checks the licence on those records and ingests content with a Creative Commons licence. And this adds up, as OAPEN hosts more than 32,000 titles that have been licenced that way already and is set to grow!

The Community Comes Together

Community support has been central to the success of both CLOCKSS and the OAPEN Library. By engaging with libraries, publishers, and academic institutions, these services have expanded their capabilities and better served the needs of the scholarly community. The involvement of diverse stakeholders has driven continuous improvement, making OAPEN and CLOCKSS more inclusive and comprehensive resources for the global academic community.

The growth of OAPEN and CLOCKSS has been marked by an unwavering commitment to transparency and collaboration. By working closely with partners and the academic community, we have developed policies and practices that align with the needs and values of their users. This collaborative approach not only strengthens their infrastructure but also fosters a sense of shared responsibility among contributors.

CLOCKSS and OAPEN demonstrate a strong commitment to biblioequity by ensuring the broad and inclusive dissemination and curation of scholarly knowledge from around the world, in multiple languages. This commitment guarantees that all users, regardless of their financial resources or geographical location, have ongoing access to a diverse range of scholarly works. Both organizations promote biblioequity by supporting open access to content, which enhances accessibility and discoverability of academic resources. By providing open repositories and encouraging open access publishing, CLOCKSS and OAPEN remove barriers to knowledge, fostering a more equitable distribution of educational resources globally. Together, CLOCKSS and OAPEN play a crucial role in promoting equitable access to information, supporting a more inclusive and diverse global scholarly community.

Planning for the Future

Looking ahead, the OAPEN Library and CLOCKSS are poised to continue their growth, building on their strong foundation of community support, reliable data preservation, and a commitment to open access. By maintaining these core principles, we will remain vital resources for the global academic community, contributing to the broader movement toward more equitable and accessible scholarly communication.

As the digital landscape continues to evolve, the partnership between OAPEN and CLOCKSS will be essential in preserving the durability of knowledge, ensuring that scholarly output remains accessible and secure for generations to come.

About CLOCKSS: CLOCKSS is a not-for-profit, community-driven digital archive dedicated to the long-term preservation of academic content. It ensures the enduring availability of scholarly literature by securely archiving digital content from academic publishers and making it freely accessible under an open access license if the content becomes unavailable from any publisher or database. By utilizing a decentralized preservation model, CLOCKSS maintains multiple copies of digital content across a network of geographically distributed nodes, safeguarding against data loss due to technical failures or economic challenges faced by publishers. This robust approach to digital preservation supports the academic community’s need for reliable, long-term access to scholarly materials, thereby playing a vital role in maintaining the integrity and continuity of academic knowledge over time.

About the OAPEN Foundation: OAPEN started out as a project funded by the European Commission and became a legal non-profit Dutch entity in 2011. The OAPEN Library hosts, disseminates, and facilitates the preservation of open access books. The OAPEN Foundation launched the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) in 2012, inspired and supported by DOAJ. It indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books. DOAB became a legal non-profit Dutch entity in 2019, managed by the OAPEN Foundation and OpenEdition. The OAPEN Foundation also manages the OAPEN Open Access Toolkit, which aims to help book authors to better understand open access book publishing and to increase trust in open access books.


[1] Laakso, M. (2023). Open access books through open data sources: Assessing prevalence, providers, and preservation. Journal of Documentation, 79(7), 157–177. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-02-2023-0016


Barricading an open access website – reflections on the attack on DOAB

As many of you might have noticed, last week the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) website was unavailable for several days. Sadly, the reason for this was not a technical glitch as we first suspected, but an actual attack on DOAB.

During the weekend of 21 January, someone decided to flood the Domain Name Server (DNS) of our registrar with requests for the DOAB record – a DDoS attack.

A short explanation: when you type in www.doabooks.org, your browser looks up this address in a Domain Name Server, which translates it to an IP address (that looks like, e.g., 123.123.123.123). However, when an attacker overloads the DNS with these lookups, this does not work any more. The result is that the website is working fine, but it can’t be reached.

Sadly, we were not immediately able to understand what was happening, as we did not have any previous experience with this kind of situation. Once the reason was clear, we could take measures. We moved our domain name registration to Cloudflare, a company that specialises in the protection against these kind of attacks. At the same time, we have done this for the OAPEN and the OA Books Toolkit websites as well.

Thank you for your patience with us as we navigated these new circumstances and please accept our apologies for the inconvenience caused. We hope that our explanation was clear, but of course, please contact us if you have any questions or remarks.

Book Analytics Service testimonials

Don’t just take our word for it – read about how our partner presses are benefitting from the Book Analytics Service:

The Books Analytics Service has been incredibly beneficial for Big Ten Open Books.

We were able to implement our dashboard with data from several different content hosting platforms. The amount of time and intellectual energy that would have had to be spent on manually aggregating this data is significant and would not have been able to demonstrate the granularity of the interactions with our content.

Having this robust, and straightforward technology that pulls together all our data in one place has been amazing for us. Our open access content project is just in the first few months of our initial launch.

This data gathered and presented by the BAD project has allowed us to report back to our investors about the community engagement we’ve realized. Implementing the dashboard for Big Ten Open Books has been essential to our project’s success and has helped the broader academic community to realize how impactful Humanities scholarship can be when made open access. It is now a core element of our site.

We are so appreciative of the work that the BAD project staff have done to make the usage of open access content more visible. Making this information public on our site exceeds our expectations for being able to provide transparency to our investors. Thank you for all the work you do!

Kate McCready, Visiting Program Officer at the Big Ten Academic Alliance

CEU Press, with the help of COPIM, launched its open access model in 2021. Opening the Future funds the frontlist in open access by leveraging backlist title sales. The key to the success of the model will be demonstrating impact, which includes usage of the open access titles that we publish. Since we share our OA books on as many platforms as possible, aggregating OA usage across these sites and making sense of that data is time consuming and requires standardisation across the industry. The Book Analytics Service is the solution to this problem!

Emily Poznanski, Director, CEU Press

The BAD project team have made it possible for University of Michigan Press to pilot the groundbreaking Book Analytics Service in the USA. The team’s information science expertise has smoothed the bumpy task of normalizing data from the many different platforms that host our open-access books. The team has shown both innovation and a commitment to integrity and partnership. The benefits of their work are hard to overstate. Authors can now easily monitor the impact of their individual titles to advance their academic careers. Funders can use the dashboard to obtain proof of return on investments. The visualizations of global reach have reinforced support for the Press’s equitable business model that never requires author payment. As 2022-2023 Association of University Presses President, I know that many other publishers are excited by the Book Analytics Service. This is due to the expertise of the BAD project team.

Charles Watkinson, Director, University of Michigan Press and Associate University Librarian, University of Michigan Library

We have worked with the BAD project team since 2019 on the management of UCL Press book download data, including gathering, collating and presenting data on a public dashboard developed by the team. They provide a seamless and reliable service that we have not found from any other provider, and as such we regularly recommend them to other presses.

Our dashboard provides vital information about the global usage of the open access books we publish which demonstrates the success of the OA model to our institution and shows how the university’s investment in UCL Press benefits UCL. It also means authors can easily see how their books are performing, and other stakeholders such as funders, prospective authors and the wider scholarly publishing community can see the global impact of OA books, which helps to make the case for greater support for a transition to OA.

Lara Speicher, Director of Publishing, UCL Press

Everything you need to know to get started with the Book Analytics Service

Niels and I were recently at the Frankfurt Book Fair to meet with publishers and spread the word about our new Book Analytics Service (BAS). 

Laura J. Wilkinson and Niels Stern at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2023

Funders increasingly require data about the usage of open access books. This data is also useful for authors, and for explaining the case for the increased reach of OA content compared with paid content.

Gathering usage data for OA books is time-consuming, as you have to retrieve it from all the different platforms which host your content. The output formats and even what’s being counted will vary between these platforms, increasing the amount of work you need to do to synthesise the data.

The Book Analytics Dashboard (BAD) project is the origin of the Book Analytics Service. It’s come a long way from its early days as a pilot, and the service is now functioning and hosted by OAPEN, under the same community governance model that has made OAPEN a trusted infrastructure for OA books. Funded by the Mellon Foundation, the Book Analytics Dashboard project (2022-2025) is focused on creating a sustainable OA book focused analytics service. We are indebted to our fantastic COKI colleagues at Curtin University for their meticulous technical development work – thank you all!

Our core idea when designing the dashboard was to make it faster and easier for you to see usage for your OA titles across a range of data sources, such as OAPEN, JSTOR, and Google Books among others. We label downloads and views from the different sources, so that clear(?) comparisons can be made between what’s being counted in different places. 

To ensure the future of the Book Analytics Service beyond the timescale of the project funding, it’s essential that we have a sustainability model to bring in enough revenue to keep it going. This is a key element of the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure – see OAPEN & DOAB’s POSI self-audit.

With our project colleagues, we carefully modelled the costs of running the service, and translated this into a pricing model which takes publisher revenue into account. This cost recovery model means that if we get more publishers to sign up than are necessary to cover the costs, we can (in discussion with the community) use the surplus to develop additional dashboard features, or lower the future cost of the service. None of the revenue is paid to shareholders – as a Dutch stichting, we don’t have any – and any surplus is reinvested in our work for the community. 

Much of the cost of onboarding a new publisher to the Book Analytics Service arises from the work needed to integrate their data feeds at the start, which is why it’s not feasible to offer a free trial. However, University of Michigan Press have kindly agreed to make their dashboard and usage data open so that anyone can see it and play with the settings to see how it works – come and have a look at our demo dashboard for yourself.

At the recent Frankfurt Book Fair, some publishers asked us how the Book Analytics Service is different from commercial alternatives. Here are some of the ways in which we differ:

  • BAS is built around the book as the primary object, rather than developing a system for journals and then including books as a sidecar/afterthought.
  • BAS is hosted by OAPEN, an independent, not-for-profit organisation which can’t be sold, so our work is not at risk of being acquired and locked in by a commercial company. Learn more about our multi-stakeholder community governance and transparency in our OAPEN & DOAB’s POSI self-audit.
  • Our code is open source, allowing you to inspect, replicate, and improve it. This open box approach means you can know what’s happened to the data used in your dashboard, in contrast with opaque systems which obscure their internal workings. We present you with the collated data for your interpretation rather than producing badges or scores with no working.

Note that although our source code is open, your publisher data is private. We know that although publishers often want to see and compare themselves against others’ data, they rarely want anyone else to see their data. This is the type of question that is being explored by our parallel project, the OA Book Usage Data Trust, which focuses on the ethics and standards of data exchange.

What would you like to do next?

  • Experiment with the template Book Analytics Service dashboard (thank you for choosing to make your dashboard data open, University of Michigan Press!)
  • Learn more about how the dashboard can help you, the service levels, and pricing model. Smaller publishers may like to explore the possibility of a consortium model, in which they collaborate with other presses to share a dashboard and its costs.
  • Need help getting your metadata into the correct export format to send to BAS, or other services? Try using Thoth to create, manage, and disseminate title metadata.
  • Interested to know more about funder requirements? The PALOMERA (Policy Alignment of Open Access Monographs in the European Research Area) project investigates the reasons why books are only rarely mandated to be published OA by research funders and institutions within the European Research Area (ERA). PALOMERA will provide actionable recommendations and concrete resources to support and coordinate aligned funder and institutional policies for OA books. Such services will also include monitoring of the usage of OA books which is another use case for the Book Analytics Service.

Ready to participate? We’re delighted to have you on board! Get started by contacting us for an initial conversation.

Open access books – measured in a context

For over a decade, there have been open access books platforms. Each of those platforms share usage data and when you are an author of an open access book, you would find that it has been downloaded a certain amount of times. But how should you interpret that number? Unfortunately, the answer is not straightforward. The usage is influenced by the language of the title, its subject, but also by the platform: not all platforms reach the same audiences; furthermore, there might be seasonable differences. For instance, usage of the OAPEN Library is lower in the months of June to August, compared to September to November.

So, it would be helpful to have some clarity. A possible solution is a new metric – the Transparent Open Access Normalized Index (TOANI) score. It is designed to provide a simple answer to the question of how well an individual open access book or chapter is performing. The transparency is based on clear rules, and by making all of the data used visible. The data is normalized, using a common scale for the complete collection of an open access book platform and – to keep the level of complexity as low as possible – the score is based on a simple metric: the usage is either average, below or above average.

How does it work? As a proof of concept, we analysed the usage data of over 18,000 books in the OAPEN Library. Each book was assigned one high level subject, and the language was categorized as either English, German or Other languages. Each book was placed in a group that combined one subject and one language. Within those groups, we looked at the usage data, and determined whether a book was having average, more or less downloads.

Between groups, there are large differences: for instance, a German-language book on Humanities with 300 downloads is doing better than average, while an English-language book on Humanities would need to have reached at least 652 downloads to reach the same level. Another example is the difference between titles on Language in German versus other languages. Here, German-language books downloaded more than 250 times are scoring better than average. For books in other languages the bar is much higher: 385.

In this way, we can see how well a book is performing, compared to similar titles. In other words: when we consider the context of a book, we can actually say if its usage is better than expected.

Read more in the newly published article by Ronald Snijder, “Measured in a context: making sense of open access book data,” Insights, 2023, 36: 20, 1–10; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.627