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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. 

Marking the 15th anniversary of the OAPEN Library 

This year marks the 15th anniversary of the OAPEN Library, which was launched at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2010.  At this year’s fair, we invite you to attend our half hour panel discussion on ‘The Evolution of Open Access Books’ to celebrate the occasion.  It’s happening on Thursday, 16 October from 12:00 to 12:30 CEST at the Innovation Stage (Hall 4.0, H106).   

An anniversary like this provides an excellent moment to reflect on the past, present, and future. Two years ago, I co-wrote the article ‘Open Access to Books – the Perspective of a Non-profit Infrastructure Provider’ (Journal of Electronic Publishing, 2023, https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.3303) that covered the history of OAPEN quite well. A couple of years prior to that, I shared a more personal account of the origins of OAPEN in ‘A brief saga about open access books’ (Nordic Perspectives on Open Science, 2021, https://doi.org/10.7557/11.5751). 

So, in this blog post I will shift focus from the past to where we are today and where we’re heading at OAPEN.  

A good place to begin is our Strategic Plan 2025-2028.  Released at the beginning of this year, the plan is the result of a thorough process involving our team, as well as our Supervisory and Advisory Boards. It sets a clear direction for the future and is defined by six strategic goals. It’s the implementation of the goals, however, that makes the difference. Our team has been working hard to materialise the strategy through concrete action. 

I know that walking through a strategic plan can be quite tedious, so I will keep it brief and share some highlights to give you a general idea of how we are steering OAPEN in times of rapid change. 

Our key stakeholders are libraries, publishers, and funders. Everything we do – and should do – is to address their needs. In this way, we can best serve the research community and thereby also the researchers. We are committed to ensuring that our existing services are available and reliable, that we are able to develop new services, and build capacity for our stakeholders. A central prerogative is to promote and ensure high quality standards, improve the user experience of OAPEN, explore and implement AI where relevant. We also want to build strong partnerships, support equity in the global distribution of open access (OA) books and professionalise our organisation. 

Here’s what we’ve been doing recently to achieve all the objectives:  

  • We have established a partnership with CERN and migrated our DSpace servers to the CERN Data Centre. This reinforces the reliability and robustness of our services.
  • We have commissioned a full technical review of our infrastructures, performed by the Curtin University Institute for Data Science. This review replicated and documented our code base and provided us with an extensive report including a set of recommendations for future developments. The review considered feedback from several partners provided via thorough interviews. Based on stakeholder and partner feedback, we have solidified our backend and defined a technical roadmap based on user needs. 
  • We have revisited and elaborated our evaluation criteria for the inclusion of book publishers and further professionalised our evaluation processes – described in this blog post.
  • We have updated our visual identity and redesigned our website – read more here.
  • We have started conversations with several partners about the ethical use of AI, with a focus on respecting the licensing terms of the works we host.
  • We have joined the newly established OPERAS AI Special Interest Group.
  • We have set up an Ambassador Programme to promote the values of OA in scholarly publishing globally.
  • We have been deeply engaged in international projects focused on strengthening openness, diversity, equity, and inclusion across scholarly disciplines and publishing practices in Europe, but also in other parts of the world, most recently in Latin America and Africa.
  • We have professionalised the organisation by introducing HR policies and support functions, a Jira ticketing system, CRM, and invoicing systems, and external annual financial audit controls.
  • We have expanded our team with exceptionally friendly, engaged, and skilled colleagues representing eight different nationalities.  

Many of these activities are ongoing and keep us all very busy. Constantly improving and fine-tuning our workflows and services requires a lot of effort. Additionally, new activities are in the pipeline, for example – based on the Curtin recommendations – the development of automated workflows for importing OA books into the OAPEN Library and upgrading the DSpace software to the next version. We also want to expand our engagement in the Middle East and Asia while maintaining strong connections to our existing community of libraries and publishers.  

All our services and work invested in them are only made possible through the generous financial support of more than 350 libraries around the world. We are extremely grateful to all those who support us and we invite other libraries to consider doing the same – more info here. Even if financial isn’t possible, there are other important ways to contribute. We encourage libraries to advocate for OA books whenever possible and integrate the OAPEN Library collection of over 40,000 peer-reviewed OA books into their library catalogues, making them immediately available to their patrons. It’s free of charge and there are multiple ways of doing it – see here.  

We also want to thank the hundreds of publishers who trust us to host their books. Without your content there would be no OAPEN Library. If you are a publisher considering joining OAPEN, here’s the info you need to know. 

We also want to extend our gratitude to the research funders we work with. We are immensely grateful for our collaboration and invite other research funding organisations to explore our collection services or consider becoming part of the Policy Forum on OA Books. 

We are fortunate to be part of a vibrant, amicable, and fast-developing community. Good colleagues are foundational to bringing progress and joy to work. This, alongside a strong drive to fulfil our mission and vision, is what personally helps me get up in the morning.  

Since beginning my career in scholarly book publishing in 2003, I have strived to ensure that high quality research published in book form can reach their audiences as far and wide as possible. Open access is the most effective means to ensure this, which is why the work we do at OAPEN is truly meaningful to me.  

Scholarly books that have undergone rigorous peer review and meticulous editorial work deserve to be available not only to scholars and students but also to readers across the globe. When I worked in publishing, I was always fascinated by the interest in research books by audiences far beyond academia. These books often open doors to new perspectives on well-known topics as well as insights into hidden or overlooked parts of humanity and the society we live in.  

Books carry weight and trust. In an increasingly polarised and fragmented society contaminated by misinformation and post-truth claims, scholarly books play a vital role. At a few recent conferences – including at the Open Science Fair 2025 and the UN Science Summit 2025 – I have addressed the work we do to promote and ensure trust in OA book publishing.  

Reflecting on the article “The Aspasia Project: Protecting and Repairing the Infrastructure of the Public Debate” by my good friend and colleague Pierre Mounier, I believe our work contributes to a larger effort of restoring the public knowledge infrastructure. Pierre underscores that this restoration is urgently needed to protect our liberal democracies from ruthless autocrats who want to dominate the world. In this sense, I feel that we – as part of a larger community – are part of an extremely important and existential mission to uphold our values and our way of life and build a better future for the next generations.  

I truly look forward to the next 15 years and to continuing this journey with our fantastic team to fulfil our mission in collaboration with libraries, publishers, funders, and our brilliant community partners across the world. 

Change of technical leadership at OAPEN and DOAB

Shortly after the launch of the OAPEN project back in 2008, I remember that the project coordinator, Eelco Ferwerda at Amsterdam University Press (AUP) introduced a new colleague to the project: Ronald Snijder. Ronald was the Project Supervisor Digital Publications at AUP and introduced to support the technical coordination of the OAPEN project.

After the launch of the OAPEN Library in 2010 and the subsequent establishment of the OAPEN Foundation, Ronald became the technical coordinator of OAPEN, however from 2014 until the end of 2019 only one day per week while working the remaining days of the week at the Employee Insurance Agency (UWV) in the Netherlands as a Data Architect. In 2020, Ronald came back full time to the OAPEN Library and the Directory of Open Access Books as Operations Manager and then later as CTO/Head of Research.

His impact on the infrastructures is immense and no one knows their way around the OAPEN Library as well as Ronald. He has been overseeing and with colleagues developed the technologies that enable OAPEN and DOAB to connect hundreds of publishers with thousands of libraries around the world. Wizarding intricate metadata conversion schemes has indeed been a hallmark of Ronald and colleagues and partners know and respect him for his expertise in this domain. But he is also known for his interest in the impact of publishing academic books open access which has led to many scholarly articles and papers and most notably his PhD dissertation from Leiden University in 2019 published by AUP and of course available in the OAPEN Library (http://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/25287).

Ronald has now decided to make a change in his working life. From October 2025 he will pursue a new role as Enterprise Architect at the National Health Care Institute in the Netherlands. While we regret that Ronald is leaving us, we wish him all the very best in his new role. We will miss him greatly for all his work, support, friendliness, and dry Dutch humour and indeed we thank him deeply for the time and effort he has devoted to OAPEN and DOAB. Ronald’s last working day at OAPEN Foundation will be 29 August 2025.

Ronald leaves OAPEN and DOAB in good shape. We have recently migrated our DSpace environments (the servers) to the CERN Data Centre in Geneva. Our DSpace specialist and programmer, Vaggelis Theodorakopoulos, has been working with us for almost two years and has become fully acquainted with the services and together with the rest of the Tech team, they will ensure that OAPEN and DOAB are in good hands.

Our strategic plans for the coming years (https://www.oapen.org/oapen/oapen-strategic-plan-2025-2028 and https://doabooks.org/en/doab/doab-strategic-plan-2025-2028) together with the recommendations of a report commissioned from the Institute for Data Science at Curtin University in Australia (performing an independent technical review and documentation exercise of the infrastructures) have given us a clear technical roadmap for OAPEN and DOAB.

To steer these developments, we are now hiring a new Head of Technology (see vacancy note) to bring OAPEN and DOAB into the future in close collaboration with a fast-growing and very exciting community around open access publishing of academic books. This marks a next phase for OAPEN and DOAB as we celebrate the 15 years anniversary of the OAPEN Library this year at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Much has happened in the OA books landscape since the launch of the OAPEN Library in 2010. And much has happened to the OAPEN Library. It began with six publishers adding their peer-reviewed OA books to a shared platform – now more than 400 publishers contribute over 40,000 books. New open services for academic books have emerged over the past few years that OAPEN and DOAB are interoperating with. Libraries, publishers, and research funders have new requests that we are responding to or in the process of finding solutions for. OAPEN is engaged in multiple international projects and new directions for OA book publishing, for example Diamond OA book publishing. Etc. etc. The landscape has certainly changed over the past 15 years!

We sometimes jokingly say that OAPEN is an old start-up that has now become a professional organisation. Building on Ronald’s comprehensive contributions over the years we are now taking even further steps to improve the resilience, efficiency, and scalability of OAPEN and DOAB. Exciting times are ahead of us and while we regret that Ronald has chosen not to be part of this journey, we wish him all the best on his new career path and truly thank him for his contributions over the years.

Ronald Snijder standing next to the OAPEN poster at the launch of the OAPEN Library in 2010 at the Frankfurt Book Fair (a rather blurry screen shot, unfortunately, of a recording with my iPhone 3).

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

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

Interacting with OAPEN and DOAB – a dialogue 

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

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

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

OAPEN under attack: a swarm of locusts 

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

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

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

Our solutions to the problem 

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

What measures have we implemented? 

  1. Blocking known offenders 

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

  1. Rate limiting 

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

We are applying the following limitations to handle these instances: 

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

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

  1. Separating file downloads from information requests 

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

  1. Continuous monitoring 

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

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

Looking Ahead 

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

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

Two Years On: A Conversation with DFG on Supporting Open Access Books


It has been two years since OAPEN launched a dedicated collection of DFG-funded open access books. Part of this collection is supported by the DFG Open Access Publication Funding programme. To mark this occasion, OAPEN’s Funder Relations Manager, Laura Bandura-Morgan, interviewed Michael Geuenich, Programme Officer, Scientific Library Services and Information Systems, and Dr. Angela Holzer, Programme Director. Scientific Library Services and Information Systems, of the Deutsche Foreschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). 

Thank you for accepting our invitation for this interview.

1. To begin with, could you tell us a bit more about this funding programme? 

The “Open Access Publication Funding” programme is designed to grant a fixed allowance for the publication of research results via open access. Only research institutions, not individuals, may apply for this allowance – the institutions in turn can use the allowance to endow their Open Access publication funds to enable their researchers to publish their research results. This includes the publication of journal articles as well as open access books (monographs, edited volumes).

This funding programme highlights that open access plays a pivotal role in improving scientific communication and that its costs should be seen in relation to this aim. The aim of this funding programme is to create structural adjustment in financial flows, thus enabling the transformation of open access and improving transparency regarding the costs for open access publication of research results.

The funding of open access publication costs thus is firstly directed towards those research institutions that require it due to the transformation towards publication-based accounting. The provision of funds should secondly result in the formation and development of adequate structures at the institutions receiving funding, to enable them as far as possible to identify the costs of publications in an automated and standardised manner. Therefore, the programme aims to support institutions with the introduction and development of such structures by subsidising researchers’ fees for open access publications.

Open access transformation ultimately requires structural adaptations to the entire system for financing the costs of scholarly publishing. The third aim of the programme is therefore to create a transition to open access funding in which research funders assume financial responsibility for the publications arising from the research they fund.For all OA books funded under the funding programme, quality assurance is ensured by the requirement that the funded books meet the quality standards of AG Universitätsverlage (Association of University Presses in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and South Tyrol, https://ag-univerlage.de/?page_id=2563).

2. What has been DFG’s experience with it so far, and does it meet the expectations of the researchers it is designed to support?

Since the start of the programme in 2021, the DFG has approved funding for open access publications with a volume of 109.3 million euros. The success of the programme can be seen not least in the fact that the programme was ‘overbooked’ in all application years, i.e. a large number of successful proposals were approved, meaning that across-the-board cuts had to be made to the approved funds per publication.

Approximately 4% (4.5 million euros) of the 109.3 million have been approved for the funding of Open Access monographs resulting from DFG projects.

We and the funded libraries have observed that the funding has definitely resulted in a stronger boost in the area of monographs and has created more awareness also among researchers in the Humanities for the importance of Open Access.

We are also noticing an interesting development in the publication of books. The number of books actually funded remains still below the number applied for. One of the possible reasons for this is that the specific publication processes for books follow a different timescale. The publication of a monograph or an edited volume requires more time than the publication of journal articles, and therefore the development takes longer and the funds cannot be used immediately. 

3. Why did you choose to partner with OAPEN to host your funded OA books?

With regard to the books funded through the Open Access Publication Funding Programme, it seemed important to us to have a central place, a single point of contact for all books resulting from this funding. OAPEN is a reliable and community-oriented partner that has been doing valuable work for many years, and which itself emerged from a EU co-funded project. The close links with the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) also ensure the visibility of the funded open access monographs.

The current situation in science politics shows that ‘lots of copies keep stuff safe’; the decision to also deposit the monographs in the OAPEN Library as a repository therefore proved to be the right one. In addition, we have also included in the collection all publications that have been submitted by publishers cooperating with OAPEN and bear a reference to the DFG in the funding acknowledgement. This provides a valuable overview of a selection of the Open Access monographs funded by the DFG via research projects.

Of course, not all Open Access monographs resulting from DFG funding or DFG-funded projects are included in the collection yet. Those publications that were not funded through the “Open Access Publication Funding” programme or that have not been published by one of the publishers cooperating with OAPEN are not included. We would therefore like to see more scientific publishers seeking cooperation with OAPEN so that the OAPEN quality standards can be guaranteed for these publishers.

Since the launch of this programme in 2021, DFG has initiated several other initiatives related to funding open access books. One recent example is the National Service Point for Diamond Open Access (SeDOA), which is set to officially begin on May 1st.

4. Could you elaborate on the key objectives of SeDOA, especially those that are related to OA books?
(e.g. What initial steps will be taken to realize the project’s goals? How will the project support Diamond Open Access book publishing?)

SeDOA is the consortium of 15 institutions that won the ‘Fresh Momentum for Open Access’ call for proposals, which the DFG organised in 2024. The objective of this call was to boost the performance capacity of Diamond Open Access infrastructures located at publicly organised institutions in Germany or operated by non-commercial and non-profit actors in Germany.

SeDOA will act as a central hub for Diamond Open Access services – it will match journals, book series or individual publication projects with appropriate Diamond Open Access publishing services.

The work of SeDOA will not only focus on journals, but will also explicitly look at books. The participating institutions will contribute their expertise in scholar-led open access publishing for books. The consortium includes the University Library of Heidelberg with its Heidelberg University Publishing, the Technical University of Berlin with its university press (as part of Berlin Universities Publishing) and ZB MED in Cologne. Further institutions associated through AG Universitätsverlage contribute the expertise of many years of experience in support and development of services for OA Books. Furthermore, Bielefeld University Library was involved in the EU Horizon Europe project “PALOMERA” that sought to to accelerate the open access transformation of books by aligning OA book policies.

Besides other tasks SeDOA will offer workflow-related basic services like layout, writing environments, editorial software, hosting etc. and will also provide support for transitioning publications into the non-commercial open sector.

5. Do you anticipate that SeDOA will lead to any changes or adaptations in the existing Infrastructures for Scholarly Publishing programme—particularly in terms of financial support for open source publishing platforms, digital preservation services, or infrastructure development for books?

With the approval for SeDOA, the existing funding programme “Infrastructures for Scholarly Publishing” was also adapted. Since the end of last year, applicants have been required to first use the services of SeDOA if, for example, they are planning to establish a new Diamond Open Access publication.

Because SeDOA offers workflow-related basic services, it is now possible for editors of Diamond OA journals not to have to submit a specific funding application (with an uncertain outcome) for many works, but to use the services of SeDOA instead.

We expect that the balance will change for those applications in the funding programme that relate to the publication of papers: Basic services will be covered by SeDOA, but the further development of platforms, tools and business models will move more into the focus of funding.

At best, SeDOA and the projects funded in “Infrastructures for Scholarly Publishing” will complement each other, so that SeDOA can also help to disseminate the knowledge and progress gained in the projects to the entire Diamond Open Access community in Germany.

Lastly, how do you see funding for OA books developing in the future?

Open access books have a different speed of open access transition than journal articles or conference papers. This can be observed particularly in scientific disciplines such as the humanities and social sciences, which still publish monographs more than other disciplines. For subject areas like art history or architecture, for example, there are challenges that other areas do not face in the same way – for example, the (often impossible) open access licensing of image material. The removal of such barriers could potentially be a topic for the Policy Forum for Open Access Books that will take place the first time in May.

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.

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.