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

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. 

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).

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. 

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.  

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.

Addressing the recent issues with DOAB

The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) is an independent, not-for-profit index of  peer-reviewed open access books. Our current collection consists of 86,000+ titles from 750+ publishers and in 100+ languages.  

Lately, we have received feedback on a disruption to DOAB, noticing the website takes a while to load, times out, or even crashes. We apologise to anyone who has experienced any inconvenience. This is due to a server capacity overload. Put simply: DOAB is too large for the environment it currently runs on.  

To solve this more structural issue and provide you with an improved service, we have struck an exciting partnership with the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN), see the announcement from March, and we currently are in the process of migrating our services  to the CERN Data Center. We hope to finalise this move by the end of September. 

We value our community of stakeholders and users and share in your frustration. We thank you for your continued patience with us as we navigate this challenge and move the entire DOAB (and OAPEN) environment to CERN’s Data Center.  

‘Ubuntu’ in Africa and Beyond: Building a Global Community for Open Access Books

This blog post is written by Jordy Findanis, Project Manager, on DOAB’s recent participation in the workshop “Towards Sustainable Open Access Book Publishing in the African Context” at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, 7–9 February 2024.

A more equitable, inclusive and sustainable open access (OA) publishing landscape can only be achieved by engaging with communities outside the usual sphere of influence within the wider publishing ecosystem. Such an understanding informs DOAB’s mission to serve as a global discoverability service as it continues to build its collection of high-quality, academic, peer-reviewed OA books. Despite the list’s growing diversity, now including more than eighty languages and 700 publishers, there is still a strong underrepresentation of OA research from the global South, not least Africa. As part of DOAB increasingly accelerating its outreach activities in the African context, and growing our understanding of OA in the many different settings that constitute that vast continent, my colleagues Niels Stern (Managing Director) and Mary Felix-Mania (General Manager) and I welcomed the opportunity to attend the in-person workshop “Towards Sustainable Open Access Book Publishing in the African Context” held on 7–9 February at the University of Cape Town. 

Beautifully perched on the lower slopes of iconic Table Mountain, the University of Cape Town (UCT) and UCT Libraries served as an ideal venue for the three-day workshop. The remit of the workshop was to address barriers and challenges impeding open scholarly communication from flourishing in the African context and to probe opportunities and developments that can support the open agenda and grow African scholarship. In collaboration with our good colleagues from the Open Book Futures project, the UCT, Lancaster University and the Association of African Universities, we teamed up with delegates from countries all over Africa − including South Africa, Malawi, Kenya, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Sudan, Ghana, Lesotho, Nigeria, Zambia and Namibia − to learn from each other, exchange ideas and skills, and share best practices.

Reclaiming Equity in Practice

A key issue informing the workshop from the outset was inequity within scholarly publishing. With the advent of the internet and the early drafting of OA declarations came the hope of the enfranchisement of marginalised research communities. But rather than enabling the production and dissemination of research, the very inequities that the OA movement sought to redress have become further entrenched. As the publishing landscape continues to be disproportionately “northernised,” systemic inequalities will persist and prevent a healthy and not least necessary bidirectional flow of research between the north and south. A significant point reiterated throughout the workshop was to work towards adopting practices and policies that address local concerns, that is, leveraging support for local knowledge production and developing bespoke infrastructures and resources to serve that very aim. This begs the question: how can this be done in practice?

Something that was stressed throughout the workshop was the importance of developing local infrastructures that can support African research. The University of Cape Town, for example, has made significant inroads in reclaiming ownership of its knowledge production by flipping their publishing house to a fully-fledged OA press and further developing the African Platform for Open Scholarship. Sitting within the UCT Libraries, this platform seeks to sustain diamond OA publishing, and its overarching aim is to make it possible for “the African research community to take ownership of creating and sharing its own scholarly content, which contributes to the growth and development of local research for African society,” and thus fostering a “community-based publishing alternative model that disrupts the commercial publishing system. This shift returns the control of publishing back to the researcher community.”[1] In 2023 DOAB was delighted to welcome the African Platform for Open Scholarship as one of our new Trusted Platform Network partners. Such collaborations are important as they promote the equitable flow and exchange of research, but also, crucially, as we depend on these partner platforms’ expertise and understanding of their own local research areas and cultures. We trust that, in time, this and the enhancement of similar initiatives across Africa will improve research dissemination, ensure more bibliodiversity and pave the way for bridging the global North−South knowledge divide.

There are many components that need to be in place to ensure a healthy and sustainable OA ecosystem. In dedicated workshop sessions, a wide range of important issues impinging on OA were collectively discussed, including repositories, metadata and distribution, funding, network building and advocacy, dispelling of OA myths, facilitating OA toolkits and resources, OA publishing and the production processes, and copyright and licensing. What emerged from these lively sessions was a myriad of different perspectives and experiences. Within the library space, for example, we heard of cases in which one institution had some resources and infrastructure but no policy in place, whereas the reverse would be the case for another institution. Several delegates mentioned that it was difficult to align strategies even within the same institution − as one delegate eloquently put it, using the metaphor of a band: the drums are playing in the east, the guitar in the west, the bass in the south and the singer in the north. At the end of the day, it is up to a few committed staff to align, facilitate and drive OA in their institutions with whatever resources they have at hand.  

Takeaways and Challenges

The Secretary General of the African Association of Universities, Professor Olusola Oyewole − representing over 440 African universities – spoke to some of the most immediate and pressing challenges raised by delegates as critical to overcome in a continental OA push: 1) advocacy and OA awareness; 2) capacity building for OA; 3) fostering networks, partnerships and collaboration; 4) and nurturing leadership and governance of Africa higher education institutions to respond to the needs of research communities. He proposed that AAU could serve as a vessel to leverage support in following through on key action points with concrete measures. Some of these included working closely with UCT and appointing officers at the AAU to facilitate OA-related initiatives. The assistance of a pan-African organisation such as the AAU is crucial to the promotion of African knowledge production and the infrastructures that must sustain it, but so too is advocacy and the championing of OA on a local level. Delegates acknowledged that much work needed to be done and that institutional, cross-institutional and cross-national stakeholder collaboration is important in the African context over the next years.

Though familiar challenges were discussed across the event, the recurring ones were lack of funding, infrastructure (relating to both technical challenges and repositories or service providers like DOAB), human resources and training and generally the lack of awareness about OA and incentives to solicit support from researchers, university leadership and policymakers.

A key takeaway from the workshop was that working in isolation or in a siloed manner prevents the necessary exchange of skills and resources − whether in the university, library, independent publishing house or in other scholarly communication spaces.

To sustain OA publishing there is an imperative need for collaboration and sharing – or summed up in a word spoken by many delegates, ubuntu, a nebulous word of Zulu origin that is used in many African countries. Although generally understood to mean “humanity,” the word encompasses a wide range of meanings and nuances that can also evoke a sense of the interconnectedness − or shared community − of individuals. In a research context, it is immediately clear why ubuntu is an apt word to designate community-led values, sharing research and resources to the benefit of all. No researcher, publisher, university, or library is an island unto itself − each holds an important stake in the other, and a healthy and sustainable OA environment is one in which the sum of all its parts work together, further empowering each in its turn.

We all shared the sense that the event had been a success – confirmed by post-workshop responses from participants. We learned so much from each other, made new friends, forged networks and left the workshop with a much better understanding of OA in the African context. This included the challenges that lie ahead, but also concrete ways of overcoming them. We aim to continue supporting local initiatives, including an OA landscape mapping exercise, and make best use of the momentum gathered from the workshop. DOAB will continue to make its services available to researchers, publishers, libraries and other stakeholders and to support African OA agendas. Over the next few years, we will seek to increase our outreach activities in Africa and engage with publishers, libraries and other stakeholders to continue our community-driven mission of ensuring bibliodiversity, equity and inclusion within OA book publishing.

A Word of Thanks

On behalf of DOAB, I would like to thank the University of Cape Town and UCT Libraries, and particularly Ujala Satgoor, Reggie Raju, Jill Claassen and Sai Maharaj for graciously hosting us and making our stay so pleasant; thanks also to our Open Book Futures partners, Thoth Open Metadata’s Vincent van Gerven Oei and our colleagues at the Open Book Collective, particularly Judith Fathallah and Joe Deville, for their invaluable work in bringing the workshop together; and last but not least we express our deepest gratitude to the AAU and all the other African delegates who came from near and far, for enriching the event with important perspectives from the spaces they are all working in.


[1] https://blog.aau.org/a-webinar-on-a-continental-platform-for-sharing-african-scholarship/

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.

PRISM & Peer Review Week: building trust in OA books through transparency of peer review procedures

What comes to your mind when you hear the words peer review? Perhaps it’s a group of academics evaluating manuscripts and papers, or maybe it’s a specific type of peer review, like open, double-anonymised, or collaborative. Some of you might even think of DOAB’s Peer Review Information Service for Monographs, or PRISM, as we like to call it.  

If you’ve never heard of PRISM or need a little reminder, for this year’s Peer Review Week (25-29 September), we at DOAB thought we’d tell you (especially you publishers out there) all about it! 

So, what exactly is PRISM? Good question! PRISM is a standardised way for academic publishers to display information about their peer review processes across their entire catalogue through DOAB. And the best part about it? It’s completely free!  

How does it work? you may ask. Well, first and foremost, participating publishers send us their peer review information. As well as displaying each publisher’s peer review processes, we also show which process applies to which individual publication from that publisher, for complete transparency. 

PRISM is recognisable through the handy logo visible next to a publisher or the title of a publication (all you need to do is click the logo to display more information). You can also use the search query ‘peerreview.id:*’ to find all DOAB publications with linked PRISM records (of which there are over 5,200). Last but certainly not least, the PRISM API, which includes peer review metadata, allows application developers to seamlessly incorporate peer review information into other applications. 

PRISM benefits the academic publishing community by: 

  • giving librarians confidence in recommending open access publications to their patrons 
  • allowing funders and users to see key details about quality control processes of open access books, and 
  • providing publishers with the opportunity to showcase their best practices

PRISM has been around for about a year now, and we’d love for more publishers to join us as we grow and expand this free service. We’re even developing a widget for publishers to use on their websites! You can participate following these simple steps: 

  1. Check you’re a member of DOAB and join us if you’re not 
  1. Agree to the T&Cs of PRISM
  1. Provide DOAB with your peer review process(es) as described in our documentation for publishers
  1. Log in to DOAB and create a PRISM peer review submission. When it’s accepted, your submission becomes a record. If it’s rejected, the information is deleted
  1.  Attach your PRISM record to the applicable publication(s).

Don’t forget that the OAPEN Library’s participating publishers’ peer review policies are also listed on OAPEN’s website for anyone to access.  

Please reach out to us with any questions, comments, feedback, or to participate in the PRISM service at info@oapen.org

DOAB celebrates its 10th anniversary!

This year, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), led by OpenEdition and OAPEN Foundation, celebrates its 10th anniversary. Since its inception, DOAB has evolved from an idea for indexing high quality peer-reviewed open access books and chapters to a globally used and open directory serving not only researchers and the wider scholarly community, but also the public. 

Back in 2009, following the successful example of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the OAPEN project leaders thought to create a similar resource for open access books and chapters. Discussions first took place at the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) conference in Lund in 2010.  

DOAB was officially launched at the First International Conference on OA Monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences in April 2013. The difference between the OAPEN Library and DOAB is that DOAB is a directory linking to open access books and chapters on other platforms and publishers’ websites to increase discoverability, whereas the OAPEN Library is a digital library where you can access the full text. They both share a mission to increase trust in open access books and book publishing. 

DOAB becomes and independent not-for-profit organisation 

DOAB was established as a Foundation in March 2019 under Dutch Law, jointly managed and governed by the OAPEN Foundation and OpenEdition, the French national infrastructure dedicated to open scholarly communication in the SSH. The creation of DOAB as an independent, not-for-profit legal entity ensures its sustainability to continually serve the needs of the academic community, including libraries, publishers, researchers, funders, and the public. 

Marie Pellen, Director of OpenEdition, says: “DOAB is a successful example of European cooperation across borders. We are delighted to see DOAB becoming more mature and recognised as a crucial infrastructure for open science. We are grateful to CNRS, Aix-Marseille University and the French Ministry of Research for their constant support.  This common effort enables us to create a resource that serves the research community worldwide and promotes bibliodiversity in scholarly publishing.”  

In 2020, DOAB was jointly chosen alongside OAPEN for the SCOSS second funding cycle which aims to help infrastructures become more sustainable and financially independent. SCOSS encourages universities who are invested in open science and open access to support the non-commercial services on which it depends; DOAB and OAPEN are crucial infrastructures that support the transition to open access book publishing and increase trust in the industry. 

DOAB today 

DOAB is an open infrastructure committed to open science. Its main mission is to increase discoverability of open access books and maximise their dissemination, visibility and impact. All DOAB services are free of charge and all data is freely available.  

At the time of the launch, DOAB contained 750 books from 20 publishers. Today, DOAB includes over 68,000 open access books and book chapters from over 600 publishers in more than 60 languages.  

DOAB created the Trusted Platform Network to enhance the discoverability of open access books and enable a more seamless process for publishers to list their open access books by allowing them to check whether their content meets the DOAB criteria and automatically list books and chapters.   

In November 2022, the Peer Review Information Service for Monographs (PRISM) was launched to further build trust in peer review and open access academic book publishing. PRISM is a standardised way for academic publishers to display information about their peer review processes across their entire catalogue. The PRISM logo is included on title level and at metadata level.  PRISM is now integrated in the OPERAS portfolio of services and, thanks to this, is exposed in the EOSC marketplace.

Looking to the future 

DOAB is designed to improve transparency around the quality assurance practices in open access book publishing by further developing the PRISM service and intend to continue to build trust by partnering with more publishers and aggregators globally to expand the directory for researchers, the wider scholarly community, and the public to discover.  

DOAB is still mainly populated with publishers from Europe and North America, so it aims to prioritise being more globally inclusive in the coming years, supporting bibliodiversity. An important part of DOAB’s mission is to enable equitable access to global distribution for book publishers and authors, in the same way that open access books are already provided to libraries and readers globally. DOAB seeks to serve open and equitable scholarly publishing in the best possible ways. 

Explore the collection today! 

Le DOAB fête ses 10 ans !

Le DOAB (Directory of Open Access Books), piloté par OpenEdition et la fondation néerlandaise OAPEN, fête cette année ses dix ans d’existence. Né de l’idée d’indexer des livres et des chapitres de livres en accès ouvert évalués par les pairs, le DOAB est aujourd’hui devenu un répertoire ouvert utilisé dans le monde entier, non seulement par la communauté scientifique, mais aussi par le grand public. 

En 2009, s’inspirant du succès du Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), l’équipe d’OAPEN a l’idée de créer une ressource similaire pour les livres et les chapitres de livres en accès ouvert. Les premières discussions ont eu lieu à la conférence de l’Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) tenue à Lund en 2010.  

Le DOAB est officiellement lancé à l’occasion de la première conférence internationale sur les monographies en accès ouvert dans le domaine des sciences humaines et sociales en avril 2013. Le DOAB est différent de la plateforme OAPEN, car il s’agit d’un répertoire qui renvoie vers des livres et des chapitres de livres en accès ouvert se trouvant sur d’autres plateformes et sur les sites Web d’éditeurs afin d’accroître les possibilités de découverte. OAPEN est quant à elle une bibliothèque numérique qui donne accès au texte complet. Les deux ont toutefois pour mission commune de renforcer la confiance dans les livres et l’édition de livres en accès ouvert. 

Le DOAB devient une organisation indépendante à but non lucratif 

En mars 2019, la fondation DOAB de droit néerlandais est créée. La Fondation OAPEN et OpenEdition, infrastructure nationale française dédiée à la communication scientifique ouverte en sciences humaines et socialees, en assurent conjointement la gestion et la gouvernance. Doter le DOAB d’un statut juridique à but non lucratif assure sa viabilité pour continuer de répondre aux besoins de la communauté académique, y compris les bibliothèques, éditeurs, chercheurs, organismes de financement et le grand public. 

Pour Marie Pellen, directrice d’OpenEdition, le DOAB « est un exemple réussi de coopération européenne par-delà les frontières. Nous sommes ravis de voir le DOAB évoluer et s’imposer en tant qu’infrastructure incontournable pour la science ouverte. Nos remerciements vont au CNRS, à l’université d’Aix-Marseille et au ministère de la Recherche pour leur soutien sans faille. Grâce à cet effort commun, nous pouvons créer une ressource au service de la communauté de recherche mondiale qui favorise la bibliodiversité dans l’édition universitaire. »  

En 2020, le DOAB a été retenu avec l’OAPEN pour le deuxième cycle de financement de SCOSS, dont le but est d’aider les infrastructures à devenir plus durables et indépendantes financièrement. L’initiative SCOSS encourage les universités investies dans la science ouverte et l’accès ouvert à soutenir les services non commerciaux dont elle dépend ; le DOAB et l’OAPEN sont des infrastructures essentielles qui soutiennent la transition vers la publication de livres en accès ouvert et renforcent la confiance dans ce secteur. 

Le DOAB aujourd’hui 

Le DOAB est une infrastructure ouverte engagée dans la science ouverte. Il a pour mission d’accroître les possibilités de découvrir des livres en accès ouvert et de maximiser leur diffusion, leur visibilité et leur impact. Tous les services du DOAB sont gratuits, tout comme l’accès à l’ensemble des données.  

À son lancement, le DOAB contenait 750 livres provenant de 20 éditeurs. Aujourd’hui, il inclut plus de 68 000 livres et chapitres de livres en accès ouvert de plus de 600 éditeurs dans plus de 60 langues.  

Le DOAB a créé le Réseau des plateformes de confiance pour favoriser la découverte de livres en accès ouvert et faciliter la tâche des éditeurs dans le référencement de leurs livres en accès ouvert. Ils ont ainsi la possibilité de vérifier si leur contenu correspond aux critères du DOAB et de référencer automatiquement les livres et chapitres de livres.   

En novembre 2022, a été lancé le service PRISM (Peer Review Information Service for Monographs) afin de renforcer la confiance dans l’évaluation par les pairs et l’édition de livres académiques en accès ouvert. Le service PRISM permet aux éditeurs académiques d’afficher des informations standardisées sur leurs processus d’évaluation par les pairs pour l’ensemble de leur catalogue. Le logo PRISM figure au niveau du titre des ouvrages et des métadonnées. PRISM fait maintenant partie du catalogue de services d’OPERAS, ce qui lui permet d’apparaître sur la marketplace de l’EOSC.

Nous préparons l’avenir

Le DOAB doit permettre d’améliorer la transparence sur l’assurance qualité dans l’édition de livres en accès ouvert. Cela passera par la poursuite du développement du service PRISM et une confiance accrue grâce à des partenariats avec des éditeurs et des agrégateurs du monde entier pour étendre le répertoire et le faire connaître à la communauté scientifique ainsi qu’au grand public.  

Le DOAB regroupant surtout des éditeurs d’Europe et d’Amérique du Nord, l’objectif dans les prochaines années est de l’ouvrir davantage au reste du monde afin de favoriser la bibliodiversité. Offrir aux éditeurs et aux auteurs et autrices de livres un accès équitable à la diffusion mondiale, de la même façon que ont déjà fournis des livres en accès ouvert aux bibliothèques et lecteurs et lectrices à travers le monde, est une partie importante de la mission du DOAB. Le DOAB a pour ambition de répondre de la meilleure façon possible aux besoins d’une édition scientifique ouverte et équitable. 

Explorer la collection