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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. 

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.