Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

Month: April 2020

Think.Check.Submit – books

New resource for books added to Think. Check. Submit.

Further to their announcement in October, the Steering Committee of Think. Check. Submit. is delighted to announce a new addition to its resources: a checklist for authors wishing to verify the reliability and trustworthiness of a book or monograph publisher.

Drawing on existing expertise from within the group and from experiences of their newest partner, OAPEN, the checklist for books offers sound advice along the lines of the recommendations already offered by the journal checklist.

The rest of the Think. Check. Submit. website has also been updated to make it more relevant for both books and journals.

Eelco Ferwerda, Director of OAPEN, said: “It is clear that the same issues confronted by authors looking to publish in journals, also confront authors seeking to publish a book or a chapter. What should an author look for when considering the submission of a manuscript of a book or chapter? It is very common for a journal to have its own homepage whereas, for chapter publishing, more careful scrutiny is needed of the publishing entity producing the books. I am sure that the addition of this new checklist will provide a much needed and welcome resource to authors publishing this way.”

Sofie Wennström of LIBER said: “Librarians are often asked for advice about trustworthy publishing outlets. This extension of the Think. Check. Submit. checklist includes solid recommendations for how to choose a publisher for books. It is a welcome addition to the resources a librarian can use when giving advice as it is evident that the book publishing market may offer as many, if not more, pitfalls as journal publishing. We are happy that Think. Check. Submit. offers an opportunity to avoid some of those obstacles.”

About Think. Check. Submit.

Think. Check. Submit. helps researchers identify trusted journals and publishers for their research. Through a range of tools and practical resources, this international, cross-sector initiative aims to educate researchers, promote integrity, and build trust in credible research and publications.

Think. Check. Submit. provides a checklist that guides researchers through the process of deciding which journals and now books are best for their research. The process is intended to go beyond individual journal decisions to help researchers build up their journal evaluation skills. The checklist is now available in nearly 40 languages.

Think. Check. Submit. is run, and funded, by a coalition from across scholarly communications in response to discussions about deceptive publishing. Details of the organizations contributing can be found at https://thinkchecksubmit.org/about/. The current Think. Check. Submit. committee can be found at http://thinkchecksubmit.org/faq/committee/

Ronald Snijder

More Posts

OAPEN launches on new platform

Announcement

In these deeply troubling times, we are nonetheless happy to announce that the OAPEN Library has moved to a new platform, based on DSpace, the open source repository system. Together with the move to DSpace, we have renewed the website and implemented a new content management system. The move to DSpace is part of our mission to develop as an open, community-driven infrastructure service to support open access to monographs and edited volumes. The need for open infrastructures and global, open knowledge exchange in all scientific fields has never been more apparent. 

OPERAS, DOAB and SCOSS

The move to DSpace is part of a wider project, OPERAS-P, to support the development of OPERAS (Open Scholarly Communication in the European Research Area for Social Sciences and Humanities), which is funded by the European Commission in the Horizon 2020 framework. The redevelopment also involves DOAB (the Directory of Open Access Books), to secure both OAPEN and DOAB as open infrastructures, and DOAB as a central service for OPERAS. OAPEN and DOAB have also jointly been selected by SCOSS (the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services) to be supported by the open science community in its second funding cycle.

The new platform 

The new platform is developed with open source software, using DSpace for hosting the OAPEN Library collection and Strapi for the content management system (CMS). Strapi is a CMS licensed under the MIT License. DSpace is typically used for creating open access repositories for scholarly digital content, and is supported by a large and global user base. Our development partners are Atmire in Belgium (for DSpace) and Trilobiet in the Netherlands (for the website and CMS). Our hosting partner is Huma-Num, the French national research infrastructure for the humanities and social sciences.

New features

With the migration to a new platform, we were able to introduce several new features and improve existing ones. We introduced new browsing options based on license or publication type (book or chapter), and improved our metadata offerings in MARCXML and MARC 21, based on feedback from libraries. We added a REST search API for systems to search the OAPEN Library.

A custom feature that we will make available as an open source addition to DSpace is ONIX import. Publishers use the ONIX XML standard to exchange information about their titles. We created an import script that converts ONIX XML to new records for the OAPEN Library in DSpace. The ONIX metadata now also contains chapter descriptions linked to books.

New features are being planned, and we hope to work with the community of DSpace users to develop more open source components going forward.

The first 10 years 

The OAPEN Library launched almost 10 years ago as the first international platform dedicated to open access books. The original system was developed by the University Library of the University of Amsterdam, as part of a European project coordinated by Amsterdam University Press and co-funded by the European Commission. At the launch in September 2010, the Library contained around 700 OA books from 10 publishers. Today, the Library contains over 12,000 OA books and chapters, from more than 300 publishers from all parts of the world. Last December we reached the milestone of 10 million downloads since 2013, when we introduced COUNTER reporting in collaboration with IRUS-UK.

Eelco Ferwerda

More Posts