Open Access metadata, Part Two

This blog post was written in collaboration with Jeff Edmunds, Digital Access Coordinator at the Penn State University Libraries. It’s a companion piece to the original blog post, ‘Open Access metadata: OAPEN partners with Penn State University Libraries’.

This blog post was written in collaboration with Jeff Edmunds, Digital Access Coordinator at the Penn State University Libraries. It’s a companion piece to the original blog post, ‘Open Access metadata: OAPEN partners with Penn State University Libraries’ (linked below).

In October of 2023, OAPEN announced a collaboration with Penn State University Libraries whereby OAPEN’s metadata was being transformed into MARC records, cleaned up and improved, and then made freely available for download (with a CC license assigned) via Penn State’s institutional repository, ScholarSphere.

Since September 2023, the MARC files have been downloaded hundreds of times (averaging 200-300 times per month) from many parts of the globe. The visualization below demonstrates exactly how far and wide these MARC files have been downloaded.

Downloads have originated from 40 distinct countries, with the breakdown by continent as follows:

North America: 50.8%
Europe: 32.4%
Asia: 12.5%
Oceania: 2%
Africa: 1.8%
South America: 0.5%

We are delighted to see such a global reach. This shows how the OAPEN Library is truly a global library, committed to fostering a more equitable scholarly communications infrastructure, and what we can achieve when we collaborate with libraries such as Penn State, who are also dedicated to sharing knowledge and new ideas with the world. The statistics also give us the opportunity to improve our outreach to libraries in areas of the globe that are not taking full advantage of the freely available metadata, beyond those that are covered in the image.

Now that the MARC records have been available for several months, Penn State has been able to improve its processing thanks to feedback from members of the OAPEN and DOAB Library Working Group, specifically Erik Lindgren (Information Specialist at the Turku University Library, Finland) and Emma Booth (Metadata Manager for Content Management, University of Manchester Library, UK).

Given the success of this collaboration, OAPEN and Penn State University Libraries are discussing the possibility of implementing a similar process for the metadata available from DOAB for its corpus of nearly 80,000 open access titles.

The OAPEN MARC files are updated monthly and currently describe over 33,000 open access titles.

Silke Davison

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Re-classifying knowledge: moving from BIC to Thema

As you may have seen in our newsletters, we at OAPEN & DOAB are moving from the BIC classification to the new Thema classification.

A little background

Why are we doing this? The subjects of the books and chapters in the OAPEN Library and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) are described in two ways: through keywords and a classification code. Keywords are flexible, but also language-dependent and unstructured. In contrast, a classification is independent of language and highly structured.

Landing page of the OAPEN Library with classification codes and keywords

When OAPEN was launched in 2010, we chose to use the BIC classification, which was used by many – mostly UK based – publishers. However, the BIC classification was deprecated in February 2024, and is succeeded by the Thema classification.

What does it mean for the OAPEN Library and DOAB?

For us, changing the classification is no simple task. There are several aspects to consider. Firstly, several data-related and technical changes must be made to our platforms. Secondly, we need to change our data ingestion. This has consequences for publishers and for us. And lastly, there is the actual converting of all the existing BIC classification codes to the new Thema classification codes.

Starting with the changes to be made to our platforms, we need to update our data model; the input forms for adding books and chapters; the ONIX metadata import; our metadata export feeds; the search API, and it also affects the OAI harvesting of books from Göttingen University Press, FWF and Knowledge Unlatched. Currently, in cooperation with our technical partner Atmire, this has been set up in a test environment.

What is true for a tango also applies to data ingestion: it takes two partners. On the one hand, publishers need to be aware that they should provide us with Thema classification codes – preferably starting from now. It’s great that many publishers are already doing this. On the other hand, we as the other partner have taken steps to automatically convert BIC to Thema. This is based on a conversion table we have developed internally, which you can download here.

The last part of the puzzle is the actual conversion from BIC to Thema in the data ingestion workflow. In OAPEN, there are currently over 32,000 books and chapters. In DOAB, the number of titles is now over 78,000. All of them have one or more classification codes. So, this is a huge task. To prepare for this, we are currently working on a conversion in our test environment. When we are certain we have evaluated this thoroughly, we can do it in our production environment.

When will we move to Thema?

At this moment, the test environment is all set up. The conversion of the existing BIC codes to Thema codes will take three to four weeks. This includes extensive testing and examination of the results. Once we are sure about the conversion in the test environment, we can apply the conversion in the OAPEN Library production (live) environment. This means that the conversion will take place in the month of March 2024. As March approaches, we will communicate the exact date and time.

Looking at the timeline, the conversion will take place after the deprecation of BIC. That is not a problem. Up until the change, we will make sure that the correct classification is added to the book, whether the publisher has provided us with BIC or Thema. For us, it is more important to do this conversion correctly even when it takes more time.

If you have questions, feel free to contact us (info@oapen.org)! This conversion is a complex matter for everybody involved, and if there is any way we can help, we would gladly do that.

Ronald Snijder

Open access books – measured in a context

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ronald Snijder

Open Access metadata: OAPEN partners with Penn State University Libraries

This blog post was written in collaboration with Jeff Edmunds, Digital Access Coordinator at the Penn State University Libraries.

For many years, OAPEN has made metadata describing the titles in its collection freely available for download on its website.

But since OAPEN’s metadata originates with publishers, of which there are over four hundred included in the OAPEN Library, ensuring metadata quality and consistency is challenging. The MARCXML file that is available on the OAPEN site, for example, can be easily transformed into MARC – the metadata format favored by libraries worldwide – but the MARC data can be both error-ridden and incomplete.

Many libraries therefore rely on metadata supplied by third party for-profit entities rather than acquiring the metadata from its source, OAPEN.

To address this less-than-optimal situation, the Penn State University Libraries are collaborating with OAPEN to provide MARC records for the entire OAPEN corpus, freely available via Penn State’s institutional repository, ScholarSphere, and licensed for reuse under a CC BY 4.0 license.

The Penn State Libraries download the MARCXML file of metadata from the OAPEN site once a month, transform the records into MARC, and run a series of scripts to clean and improve the data.

“Cleaning the data, standardizing it, and making certain it complies with the MARC standard allows us to give back to the Open Access community. Libraries who want access to good quality MARC records for their Open Access titles now have an option to acquire them without cost and with no legal strings attached,” said Jeff Edmunds, Digital Access Coordinator at the Penn State University Libraries.

For Open Access titles to be visible and findable in library discovery systems, good metadata is essential. Ideally, the metadata should also be open.

“Our collaboration with Penn State allows us to provide metadata for OAPEN titles in a format most suited for easy absorption into library catalogs: MARC. What Jeff Edmunds and his colleagues are doing will allow libraries to acquire good quality MARC records for OAPEN titles that can be freely shared and manipulated, at no cost,” said Ronald Snijder, Chief Technology Officer and Head of Research at OAPEN.

The OAPEN MARC records are available in ScholarSphere.

The MARC files will be updated monthly to include records for the entire OAPEN corpus.

“Our long-term goal is to create an infrastructure that allows the collaborative creation, maintenance, and sharing of open metadata for Open Access resources,” Snijder added. “This is a first step toward that ambitious goal.”

Silke Davison

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Books in a bubble

Nowadays, we refer to “bubbles” as online places where no information from outside is allowed in. But in this instance, the opposite is true: the bubbles are a tool to help visualise how well one set of books is performing, compared to other sets of books. The OAPEN Library is an open online platform, and recently we have audited ourselves, based on the POSI principles. However, apart from an infrastructure, it is also a library.

When our collection passed the 20,000 titles milestone, we felt it was time to assess our collection: how well does it perform? That is not a simple question to answer: assessments of libraries and their collections are taking place within a certain context. OAPEN is not a ‘traditional’ library with a mixed collection of physical and digital publications, and our collection criteria are perhaps a bit different: books should be peer reviewed and have an open license, but we welcome all languages and subjects. We are not linked to one ‘parent organisation’, but try to serve everybody.

Three types of stakeholders support the OAPEN Library: publishers, funders and libraries. Both publishers and funders contribute to the collection by making publications available. They will be interested in the dissemination of the books and chapters. For libraries, the composition of the collection will be paramount. How do the titles on offer fit within the information needs of their patrons?

The evaluation of the OAPEN collection should consider these two aspects. The dissemination of books and chapters is measured through the number of downloads – based on COUNTER R5 conformant data. The composition of the collection is measured among two axes: subject and language. Both dissemination and the content-related aspects are paired to the number of publications. So, we have to take into account three dimensions: number of titles, number of downloads and average downloads per title. On top of that, we need to look at the differences between languages and subjects. All in all, a complex mix.

Our solution was to use three-dimensional pictures: the bubbles.

Usage of social sciences books depicted as three-dimensional bubbles — Social sciences in the OAPEN Library collection

The bubbles display the composition of the collection and how its readers make use of it. Visualisations like this help to tell a complicated story in a simple way; a powerful instrument to guide the further development of the OAPEN Library.

More details can be found in this open access article:

Snijder, Ronald. ‘Books in a Bubble.: Assessing the OAPEN Library Collection’. JLIS.It 14, no. 2 (15 May 2023): 75–92. https://doi.org/10.36253/jlis.it-498.

Ronald Snijder

Open Access Books – Helping small libraries think big

Over the last couple of years, the OAPEN Library and Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) collections have grown significantly. We have seen more open access (OA) books being added, and welcomed new publishers from around the world. Much of the continued momentum for OA books has been made possible thanks to the support of a growing library community: investing in OA book programmes, infrastructures and services that enable not only the availability of these books in an OA format, but also their discoverability, preservation and integration into everyday workflows.

Today, we are speaking with David Dusto, Electronic Resources Librarian at the Elizabeth City State University to learn more about their engagement with OA books.

David, thank you for agreeing to share your story with us. Libraries worldwide increasingly include our collections in their library catalog. These range from large academic libraries to specialized libraries attached to research institutes as well as smaller colleges. For those unfamiliar with Elizabeth City State University, could you share a bit more about the University and its library?

Elizabeth City State University (ECSU) is a public university that is part of the University of North Carolina system. With just over 2,000 students, ECSU is one of the smallest universities in the system, and it is also a Historically Black College or University (HBCU) and approximately ⅔ of the enrolled students are minorities. Historically, ECSU started in 1891 as a teaching college, and still has a large education school. Today, ECSU is also known for its innovative aviation program. The largest U.S. Coast Guard base in the United States is also located in Elizabeth City, so we have many military students as well. The G.R. Little Library is the campus library. We have a small staff of 5 full-time librarians and two other permanent staff, and we work to meet the research and information needs of all the student body.

Could you share more about your role in the library and how you first became familiar with open access books?

I am the Electronic Resources Librarian, but my predecessor held the title “Serials Librarian”, which shows how rapidly academic libraries are changing. I first became familiar with open-access books while I was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina School of Library and Information Science over a decade ago, and have been avidly interested in the subject of both open access books and journals since then. I am also involved with the university’s institutional repository (NCDOCKS), which serves as an open-access collection for material published by students and employees at the university.

To what extent are OA books a part of your library’s strategy today?

ECSU is a small university and our budget for collection development is limited, but I have found that I can supplement our existing eBook collections by locating high-quality open-access collections and adding them to the library website and discovery system. This has been enormously helpful – usage statistics indicate that a considerable percentage of eBook views through the library website are from open-access items. Therefore, despite the small size of the library and its resources, I have been able to build a large and useful online collection for our students and faculty.

How can OA books further support your library and the institution’s mission?

It’s important for institutions such as DOAB to exercise quality control in what they add to their collection, in order for it to be as useful and relevant as possible. Ensuring that links are working correctly in OA directories will save librarians like me a lot of time and aggravation in the long run, as we won’t have to deal with authentication issues and access limits that we are often confronted with when working with subscription-based collections.

In recent years open access for books has gained momentum, yet starting from a small base with a long road ahead still. Do you have any particular expectations or wishes for the open access book community and how this may evolve in the coming years?

I hope to see more institutional support for open-access book publishing. The focus for OA materials that I have seen from universities is primarily focused on journals rather than books, and I would be pleased to see increased support from both university presses/publishing houses and also from smaller institutions that may not have their own press. This would give authors from smaller universities the opportunity to publish and raise the prestige of their own institution, rather than going through a central system press. Similarly, I would like to see increased support for open course materials, such as open-access textbooks. As textbook costs continue to rise, having open course materials not only available but also adopted by instructors would go a long way towards easing the financial burden for students while simultaneously increasing access to materials.

Tom Mosterd

The success of OAPEN and DOAB in Primo and Summon

The OAPEN Library and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) aggregate open access books and chapters, and make them globally available through several channels. We work together with many organisations, among them Ex Libris.

Diagram of the complete input and output of OAPEN and DOAB, where Clarivate is highlighted

Ex Libris – a subsidiary of Clarivate – is a provider of library services. One of their products is the Central Discovery Index (CDI) describing many scholarly and academic sources. When the same content is available through several platforms, CDI deduplicates these records into one unified merged metadata record. It is available for libraries using Primo and Summon. The metadata of the OAPEN Library and DOAB are indexed in CDI.

Recently, we received a usage report from Ex Libris, describing how libraries worldwide interact with DOAB and OAPEN through their catalogues. We are happy to see that more than 1,500 libraries or library consortia have been using the open access books and chapters we provide. To better understand the global impact, we used the Open Alex API to find the countries where the libraries reside, and we found organisations in 118 different countries.

World map, countries that use Primo or Summon are highlighted.

Of course, most libraries did not just check one title in DOAB or the OAPEN Library. According to the data, the combined libraries reached our platforms 1,251,743 times in the last 12 months. DOAB – with its larger collection – saw 75% of that number.

Below an overview of the 50 most active libraries:

Bar chart of the 50 most active libraries

In conclusion, the integration of OAPEN and DOAB metadata into the Ex Libris platforms has worked well for many libraries. This is just one example of the integration of open access books data into a platform. We have made our metadata available to the public domain, and we have made sure it is available in several formats (OAPEN, DOAB), which allows many stakeholders to use it to their advantage. Hopefully, this will inspire even more ways to make open access books globally available.

Ronald Snijder

How would you describe yourself?

We have updated our MARCXML and ONIX feeds, in order to better disseminate the books and chapters in our collections.

Almost everyone has at one time or another been asked to describe themselves. For the books and chapters in OAPEN and DOAB this happens all the time: many libraries, publishers and content aggregators want to know exactly what is in our collection. In order to answer these questions, we provide daily updated metadata exports – see here (OAPEN) and here (DOAB).

Figure 1 "Self description" - Source: https://xkcd.com/688/ — Figure 1 “Self description” – Source: https://xkcd.com/688/

Two of those metadata exports have recently been updated: the MARCXML and the ONIX feed.

MARCXML – Now complying with the NAG guidelines

Figure 2 Metadata Profiles:MARC21 Records for Print & Electronic Books

The MARCXML feed – which is based on the MARC21 standard – is used primarily by libraries.

The MARC21 standard contains many options to describe publications, and thus it is quite helpful that the National Acquisitions Group (NAG) and the Southern Universities Purchasing Consortium (SUPC) have created guidelines for standardised MARC21 records for print books, eBooks and eTextbooks.

By following this standard, content providers can better support academic libraries. We have now made sure that our MARCXML metadata feed adheres to this standard.

Improved ONIX feed

Apart from the MARCXML feed we have also updated our ONIX feed. ONIX for Books is an XML format for sharing bibliographic data describing both traditional books and eBooks.

Just like MARC21, this standard is very comprehensive. It is also quite rigorous: there are many checks on the content. In order to make sure our metadata better fits with this standard, we have made several small adjustments to how related ISBNs or funding data are displayed.

We hope these changes to the metadata allow the books and chapters in our collection to describe themselves a little better. If you have further questions, please contact Ronald Snijder: r.snijder[@]oapen.org.

Ronald Snijder

NWO-funded book author interview: Rens Bod

Since the start of our collaboration with NWO – The Dutch Research Council, the OAPEN Library has seen the NWO collection grow, now containing almost 200 titles. OAPEN asked 3 authors/editors of books arising from NWO-funding to share their experiences and views, the third interview is with Rens Bod:

L.W.M. (Rens) Bod is a professor in digital humanities and history of humanities at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on the exploration of patterns and underlying principles in language, music, art, literature, and history. He is the author of the first historical overview of the humanities from Antiquity to the present: A New History of the Humanities. Bod is a Vici-laureate and he is currently PI in the NWO Gravitation project “Language in Interaction”.

Your recent publication is an English translation of your book that was previously published in Dutch. Published with Johns Hopkins University Press: World of Patterns – A Global History of Knowledge was made freely available under a CC-BY licence, allowing re-use. What was your motivation for publishing the translation of your book openly and under this license, in other words what was your motivation to change your pattern?

I wanted to make the book as widely accessible as possible, and open access is the best strategy to do this. Thus I learned from the publisher (JHU Press) that my book was downloaded already over 40.000 times in the first month only. So for creating impact, open access seems a fantastic way to go. As to the CC-BY licence: this was entirely the publisher’s choice.

In the acknowledgements of World of Patterns, you mention various funding sources. Could you elaborate on your experience in gathering funding for an open access version?

My previous funding sources, such as NWO Vici and NWO Gravitation, did not involve funding for open access. But in the recent past I did ask for funding to make our book series The Making of the Humanities open access(three volumes published together with Jaap Maat and Thijs Weststeijn by Amsterdam University Press, 2010, 2012, 2014). We obtained small amounts of funding from different foundations, including the J.E. Jurriaanse Foundation and the Dr. C. Louise Thijssen-Schoute Foundation. This involved quite some work, as it meant that we had to apply several times for small amounts of funding for each volume.

Did unrestricted access help you to reach new audiences compared to traditional publishing?

Definitely, I noticed that I have several readers from the Global South who might not have been able to read my book if they had to pay for it.

What is your view in general on open access academic book publishing, its benefits, or limitations?

I am generally positive and I believe NWO should use its open access fund also for books that are not the product of one of its funded project (my book was in fact the result of an NWO Open Competition project). It would be fantastic if many more scholars can publish their books open access, as it would increase accessibility which may be especially important for other parts of the world. Sure, there are also some disadvantages: it becomes very easy to re-use just a chapter or even a smaller part of the book without taking into account its context. People can simply copy and paste. But of course these are the consequences of our digital world. So far, I haven’t seen any misuse or abuse of my book, so perhaps the risks are not that high.

In World of Patterns you examined where our knowledge of the world began and how it developed. What is your perspective on the direction of knowledge development in the future?

That’s the hardest question to tackle. It appears that all knowledge will continue to be based on patterns (regularities, laws), principles (deeper generalizations, deterministic or statistical) and the relations between these two (inductive, deductive, abductive). I noticed in my historical research that there can also be patterns in the relations between patterns and principles, and even more: principles underlying these patterns in the relations. Now I realize this gets terribly abstract, but if we look at a variety of disciplines, such as artificial intelligence, digital history, medical information science and forensic science, then we find the re-use of successful derivations between patterns and principles all the time. It seems that this might be a promising way for future knowledge development.

Tom Mosterd

Behind the scenes: optimising workflows for OA books

In recent months, OAPEN and Bloomsbury Academic collaborated on optimising the workflow for getting open access books into the OAPEN Library. As publishers such as Bloomsbury Academic make a growing part of their book portfolio available open access, this calls for processes, workflows and ‘behind the scenes’ work evolve too to make these books more easily discoverable. We had a chat with Ros Pyne, Global Director, Research and Open Access to learn more about Bloomsbury & its OA book programme

Q: Bloomsbury has published over 300 open access books within various disciplines in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Having started publishing open access books in 2008, how are things different today compared to then, for you as a publisher?

We’ve grown a lot since our early days, expanding the range of arts, humanities, and social science subjects that we publish, and launching a range of leading digital resources such as Drama Online alongside our book publishing.

One big change is that back in 2008 scholarly book publishing was largely a print concern. Over the last decade and a half – and especially in the last couple of years – we’ve seen a substantial increase in demand for digital. That shift affects the dynamics of open access, and for Bloomsbury meant a move away from our original freemium model, which was reliant on print sales. Overall, though, interest in ebooks is a positive development from an OA point of view, as the digital open access book is increasingly viewed on equal terms with the print edition.

What hasn’t changed is our commitment to originality and excellence in the arts, humanities and social sciences, and our focus on communicating great ideas and scholarship to the world.

Q: Why was it important for Bloomsbury to improve this particular workflow with the OAPEN Library for its OA books, and why now?

The OAPEN Library and the DOAB have long been the premier platforms for discovery of open access books. The quality-control aspect, in the requirement for books to be peer reviewed, is particularly important. We also value OAPEN’s community governance and long-term commitment to open access books.

Up until now we’ve been uploading metadata to DOAB manually for each OA book we publish. That’s not particularly efficient, especially as our open access programme grows. Setting up a feed to OAPEN means we can populate both the OAPEN Library and our DOAB records automatically, which should make for a faster and more reliable process – better for us, for our authors, and for readers and libraries that use OAPEN’s services.

We also had broader aims in this project. Until now, we haven’t been able to include open access metadata in our external datafeeds, such as ONIX, and it’s been a priority for us this year to change this. Having accurate OA metadata is really important: it supports discovery and visibility of OA titles, and makes it easier for third-party organisations to flag OA status and so ensure we’re being fully transparent about that. We have found it incredibly helpful to work with OAPEN to refine our OA metadata and ensure we’re adhering to best practices, as we know we can trust your expertise in these matters. As we now move on to work with other discovery services which may have less experience in OA books, we can pass that along and help to embed those practices in the scholarly supply chain.

Q: We often hear from publishers that publishing open access books in parallel to non-open access books can be challenging. How do you handle these two publishing streams?

Our open access books are handled by exactly the same teams as our non-open access books, from editorial through to production, marketing, digital platform management, and print sales. That’s really important as it means that all our books receive the same care and attention from our expert staff, meet the same standards, and are promoted alongside each other. However, open access does affect almost every part of the book publishing workflow, and at each stage we have OA-specific requirements – this includes special open access terms in our agreements; adding Creative Commons information inside the book and on online product pages; flagging OA status in marketing materials and to third-parties; and of course distributing the titles to OA discovery services such as DOAB and the OAPEN Library.

Q: Finally, how do you foresee the role of the open access portion of your book portfolio to evolve in the coming years?

Open access is very much a priority for us. We know that open access books are read and cited more and reach more diverse readerships. That’s good for the scholarship we publish. And indeed, the arts, humanities, and social science communities that we serve are increasingly knowledgeable about and interested in open access for books. We see open access as integral to the future of research publishing, including for books, and we remain committed to exploring new and more equitable approaches. 

Tom Mosterd

International Open Access Week interview: NWO-funded book editor Karène Sanchez-Summerer

Since the start of our collaboration with NWO – The Dutch Research Council, the OAPEN Library has seen the NWO collection grow, now containing almost 200 titles. To celebrate Open Access Week, OAPEN asked authors/editors of books arising from NWO-funding to share their experiences and views, the second interview is with Karène Sanchez-Summerer:

Karène Sanchez-Summerer, Professor and Chair Middle East Studies, Faculty of Arts at Groningen University. She obtained her PhDs from Leiden University and EPHE (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris Sorbonne). Her research considers the interactions between European linguistic and cultural policies and the Arab communities (1860-1948) in Palestine. Currently, she is the PI of the research project CrossRoads: European cultural diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine. A connected history during the formative years of the Middle East (1920-1950) funded by The Netherlands National Research Agency (NWO). Five books by Karène Sanchez-Summerer are included in the OAPEN Library.

Just recently you published a book titled The House of the Priest. An Orthodox Palestinian Life (1885-1954) which is included in the OAPEN Library collection. This book is the result of the CrossRoads project funded by NWO. Could you tell us some more about your motivations for conducting this research project?

This project aims to revisit the relationship between the European cultural agenda and the local identity formation process, and social and religious transformations of Arab Christian communities in Palestine, when the British ruled (1918-1948). When we started, our main questions were: what was the role of culture in European policies regarding the Arabs of Palestine; how did Arab Christians use culture to define their place in the proto-national and religious configuration between 1920 and 1950? Eighteen months after the beginning of the project, we found in Lebanon (Beirut) so far unpublished and untranslated memoirs of Niqula Khoury, a senior member of the Orthodox Church and Arab nationalist in late Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine. This amazing manuscript discusses the complex relationships between language, religion, diplomacy and identity in the Middle East in the interwar period. We wanted to share an annotated translation of this precious and significant manuscript to explain Khoury’s memoirs and their significance for the social, political and religious histories of twentieth-century Palestine and Arab relations with the Greek Orthodox church. Khoury played a major role in these dynamics as a leading member of the fight for Arab presence in the Greek-dominated clergy, and for an independent Palestine, travelling in 1937 to Eastern Europe and the League of Nations on behalf of the national movement.

This is one of two books, available in the OAPEN Library, from the new peer-reviewed series, Christians and Jews in Muslim Societies, published by Brill. Previously you have also published your work with Springer (now SpringerNature). What was your experience with these publishers?

I’ve published several volumes in OA the last years, with Brill, and, though different with Springer (an extended book proposal is evaluated), the process went rather smoothly. The publishers wanted to know whether the book was going to be open access before starting the editing process. In addition, you can apply for NWO’s Open access books fund only after the book has been accepted for publication by the publisher (which was my case for the House of the Priest). As for the NWO Open books grant is concerned, I thought it was a very easy process, so I recommend it to anyone who would like their book to reach out to a bigger audience. Open access might cause some delay in the publication, but the advantages are worth it.

Your recent books are published under an open license, CC-BY, making it freely available and granting others a certain level of re-use, what was your motivation for publishing the book openly and under this license?

First of all, I believe any academic endeavour should be open to the public. Since this book is the result of an NWO project, which was paid for by public funds, open access is now required. Furthermore, working as a scholar on Middle Eastern studies, I’ve seen various academic settings and open access is essential in regions where many do not have access to print copies, fewer institutions can afford subscriptions.

How do you think academia and society at large can benefit from your book being available open access?

Scholars working on the Middle East can now easily prescribe parts of the book to their students, it gives them an easy access to a source translated from Arabic, all the more relevant that it is a critical edition. They can also prescribe only some of the chapters, so that students get an idea of certain aspects only (for example the Arabs in Europe and their political representation during the interwar period). The fact that institutions/individuals don’t have to purchase the book makes it easier to prescribe only some parts of it.

It has been a while since you have published these books. Did unrestricted access in any way help you to reach new audiences? In new, unexpected ways or in any way different compared to traditional publishing? If yes, how do you know this?

The creative commons engage audiences beyond the traditional readers, broadening and diversifying the audiences who get access to the book, anyone can access it. We were contacted by various types of readers, in Europe and from the Middle East – we even received a message with photos of the persons mentioned in the manuscripts (1920’s and 1930’s). The book The House of the Priest has been published just before the summer; we are eager to receive more reactions in the future.

Looking at your own publishing journey, have your views on open access book publishing, its benefits or limitations in any way changed over the years?

I was always convinced by the necessity to share widely publications, to make them available to various audiences, and that all students and scholars, all the more so when they are from/in Middle Eastern countries, in my particular case, should easily and immediately access them. Over the years, this opinion was only reinforced.

Tom Mosterd

International Open Access Week interview: NWO-funded book editor Janneke van Bergen

Janneke van Bergen is a landscape architect and PhD researcher at the TU Delft. Over the past decade she worked in the field of water and infrastructure, including Room for the River, the National Coastal Delta Program and Studio Coastal Quality. She currently works for the ShoreScape research, funded by NWO Top Sector Water Program, to investigate Building with Nature and coastal design.

Building with Nature is a concept where nature is used to cope with climate change risks, such as floods, waves, and sea level rise. You have recently published a book on Building with Nature perspectives which is included in the OAPEN Library collection. Could you tell us some more about this concept and your research project?

Within the ShoreScape project we combine research from coastal engineering and landscape architecture to promote Building with Nature (BwN) along urbanized sandy shores. In this research we develop design principles to stimulate dune formation after nourishment and reduce the negative effects of beach urbanization. The collaboration promoted new joint insights on BwN, and gave incentive to a publication on this topic: Building with Nature perspectives. This publication was funded by NWO and DIMI, a fund focusing on interfaculty research.

You published your work in TU Delft Open Publishing which follows a diamond business model. What was your experience with the publisher?

We collaborated with Research in Urbanism Series (RIUS), a scientific journal, that took well care of the publication process within TU Delft Open Publishing.

Your book is published under an open license, CC-BY, making it freely available and granting others a certain level of re-use, what was your motivation for publishing the book openly and under this license?

I think it is important for emerging fields of science, such as Building with Nature, to share scientific perspectives and work towards an overarching agenda, besides more specialist, mono-disciplinary publications. This will help to build new layers of innovative, joint knowledge.

It has been more than a year since you have published this book. Did unrestricted access in any way help you to reach new audiences? In new, unexpected ways or in any way different compared to traditional publishing? If yes, how do you know this?

It was a good way to reach a hybrid audience of both coastal engineers, spatial designers and even social sciences to cross the bridge to other disciplines working on the concept of Building with Nature. It has increased the interest for our ShoreScape publications from both disciplines (documented by ResearchGate), that otherwise would have been limited to our own disciplines only.

This year’s theme for the International Open Access Week is “open for climate justice’’. How do you think society at large can benefit from climate research being openly available, and your book being OA (Open Access)?

Certainly, I think climate adaptation is urgent, therefore is not just an academic, but public matter where all parties should be involved in. It will help academics to open up their specialisms to the social perspective, and the public to making conscious choices for climate-proof evolution.

Tom Mosterd

Big in Japan, Zimbabwe or Brazil – global reach and national preferences for open access books

To many the internationalisation of academic publishing may mean: a strong focus on global issues, written in English only. However, many academic books are written in other languages than English. We tend to link non-English publications to regional issues, so there is a tension between English as the ‘lingua franca’ enabling a global reach, versus local languages that provide a better cultural ‘fit’.

M. Adiputra, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Now from theory to practice: if you give a global audience free access to (nearly) 20,000 freely accessible books and chapters in several languages, spanning many subjects, will they all choose books in English?

In a newly published paper, we have systematically researched the preferences of readers originating from one hundred countries. By looking at the ten most downloaded books from each country, we can measure the focus on regional topics by counting the books written in languages other than English.

The outcomes of this study do not fit in a story of English language publications as the only or the main source of scholarly communication. There is a demand for regionally focused titles, countering the narrative of the dominance of English as the language of scholarly communication. Instead, this study supports the value of bibliodiversity.

Read the paper here:

Snijder, Ronald. 2022. “Big in Japan, Zimbabwe or Brazil – Global Reach and National Preferences for Open Access Books”. Insights 35: 11. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.580

Ronald Snijder

Tour de Bibliothèque: The OAPEN Library SCOAP³ for Books collection

The OAPEN Library is a growing virtual library of open access books. Researchers and curious readers find their way to the OAPEN Library via a number of entrances. As they browse, land upon or virtually stroll through the OAPEN Library, what unique books may one discover on its bookshelves? Today we’ll take a tour through the high energy physics section, where we’ll find the latest collection added to the OAPEN Library: the SCOAP³ for Books collection.

Open access books in high energy physics

The SCOAP³ for Books collection currently includes over 20 open access books in high energy physics and will, as part of this pilot initiative, grow to include a set of over 100 important texts within the discipline.

This collection includes titles such as “The Standard Model and Beyond’’ written by Paul Langacker, part of the High Energy Physics, Cosmology, and Gravitation series published by Taylor and Francis (2017). This open access book provides an advanced introduction to the physics and formalism of the standard model and other non-abelian gauge theories. It provides a solid background for understanding supersymmetry, string theory, extra dimensions, dynamical symmetry breaking, and cosmology.

Next to this readers may encounter the open access book “Challenges And Goals For Accelerators In The XXI Century’’, edited by Stephen Myers & Oliver Brüning and published by World Scientific Publishing Company (2016). This book describes the past 100 years of accelerator development with a special focus on the technological advancements in the field, the connection of the various accelerator projects to key developments and discoveries in the Standard Model, how accelerator technologies open the door to other applications in medicine and industry, and finally presents an outlook of future accelerator projects for the coming decades.

The role of books for SCOAP³

These open access books are made available thanks to the work of SCOAP³ – the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics. SCOAP³ enables open dissemination of global research outputs in high energy physics and was first introduced in 2012, with the support of the European Organization of Nuclear Research (CERN).

So what is the role of the academic book for SCOAP³ and within high energy physics more generally?

The overall objective for SCOAP3 is to enable global, equitable open access for research in the discipline of high energy physics. Having successfully converted the majority of the journal literature in the discipline to open, the Consortium decided to expand the scope of the initiative to include academic books in high energy physics and related disciplines (such as accelerator physics and instrumentation).

“Through the support of members of the consortium and partnerships with key publishers, we are making important texts in our domain completely free for students, faculty and researchers around the world. The COVID19 pandemic demonstrated how important it is for content to be widely and seamlessly accessible, and we are committed to a future where research and academic texts are available openly to anyone who might need them.” – Dr. Kamran Naim, Head of Open Science, CERN

OAPEN Library collection services

Thanks to the partnership between SCOAP³ for Books and the OAPEN Library, the SCOAP³ for Books collection benefits from the various OAPEN Library collection services. These include hosting, digital preservation, dissemination and usage reporting.

The OAPEN Library includes these books as part of its metadata feeds, API schema and OAI-PMH harvesting protocol. This enables a wide range of organisations such as academic libraries, library intermediaries, research institutions, and discovery services (including Google Scholar) to provide visibility for these open access books around the world.

In the course of the next few months, more titles can be expected to be added to this unique collection of open access books.

Tom Mosterd

The OAPEN Library and the origin of downloads – libraries & academic institutions

On a regular basis, we look at the download data of the OAPEN Library and where it comes from. While examining the data from January to August 2021, we focused on the usage originating from libraries and academic institutions. Happily, we found that more than 1,100 academic institutions and libraries have used the OAPEN Library.

Of course, we do not actively track individual users. Instead we use a more general approach: we look at the website from which the download from the OAPEN Library originated. How does that work? For instance, when someone in the library of the University of Leipzig clicks on the download link of a book in the OAPEN library, two things happen: first, the book is directly available on the computer that person is working on, and second, the OAPEN server notes the ‘return address’: https://katalog.ub.uni-leipzig.de/. We have no way of knowing who the person is that started the download, we just know the request originated from the Leipzig University Library. Furthermore, some organisations choose to suppress sending their ‘return address’, making them anonymous.

What is helpful to us, is the fact that aggregators such as ExLibris, EBSCO or SerialSolutions use a specific return address. Examples are “west-sydney-primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com” – pointing to the library of the Western Sydney University – or “sfx.unibo.it”– coming from the library of the Università di Bologna. And in this way, many academic libraries can also be identified from their web address. Some academic institutions only display their ‘general’ address.

Academic libraries and institutions, sorted by type — Academic libraries and institutions

As mentioned before, our analysis delivered over 1,100 – 1,121 to be exact – different addresses. The chart displays those addresses divided by type, and we see that many academic libraries not just rely on aggregators such as ExLibris, but also directly give access to the OAPEN Library through their catalogs. The metadata of the OAPEN Library is freely available under a CC0 license, and can be downloaded as a MARCXML file to ensure easy library integration.

Which libraries and institutions are the biggest users of the OAPEN Library according to this data? The most downloads come from MediaLibraryOnLine, the first Italian network of public, academic and scholastic libraries for digital lending; the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford; and Universidad Peruana de Ciencas Aplicados.

We are happy to see that our collection is finding its way to libraries and academic institutions all over the world!