Open Access Books: OAPEN Publishes 2020 Stakeholder (Annual) Report

From the OAPEN Foundation:

In 2020, the OAPEN Foundation celebrated its 10 year anniversary as an open infrastructure service for open access (OA) books, providing services to publishers, libraries, and research funders in the areas of hosting, deposit, quality assurance, dissemination, and digital preservation. The mission of OAPEN to increase discoverability of OA books and to build trust around OA books has been leading us through a challenging year marked by the COVID-19 pandemic.

As a non-profit foundation operating fully open and global infrastructure services for open access books, we rely entirely on the financial goodwill of the community for us to return useful services to academic libraries, research funders, and open access publishers. As open infra–structures selected by SCOSS (The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services) OAPEN and DOAB have attracted more support from institutions and consortia across the globe. Although we still have not yet reached our financial target, the increased support has been immensely helpful to maintain our services and to engage further with the community.

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In 2020 the OAPEN Library migrated to the open source DSpace 6 platform. All books in the OAPEN Library are available for direct download without any cost or registration requirements for the user. Almost 5,000 books were added to the library during 2020, increasing the total number of open access books to over 15,000.The OAPEN Library is being used worldwide. In 2020 we saw a dramatic growth of downloads from the OAPEN Library.

Downloads from the OAPEN Library increased by 77% in 2020. The collection enlarged from over 9,000 titles in October 2019 to over 13,500 titles in October 2020. In other words, it became 1.5 times larger, while the number of downloads doubled. We saw more downloads per book on average.

Direct to Full Text Report
20 pages; PDF.

Filed under: Academic Libraries, Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Digital Preservation, Libraries, News, Open Access, Preservation