Open Access Books: An Interview with OAPEN Foundation Director and DOAB Foundation Co-Director Niels Stern

From SciELO:

SciELO Books is celebrating ten years of operation focused on the development of infrastructure and the capabilities of scholarly book publishing in a digital format following the state of the art.

As part of the event celebrating the ten-year anniversary, intended as a forum to recognize the advances and challenges, and, mainly, to debate on the future of digital books in the light of open access and open science, we’ve interviewed speakers and officials from institutions directly linked to the development of SciELO.

We continue the series of interviews with Niels Stern, director of the OAPEN Foundation and co-director of the DOAB Foundation.

1. [SciELO Books] In over 15 years of notable experience with scholarly publishing and open access, how do you see the evolution of open access to books?

[NIELS STERN] I think we have seen a lot of exciting development over the last couple of years. Important policies for books have been issued (for instance European Commission, UKRI, cOAlition S). We have seen many new publishers – especially from Latin America – joining the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), several academic publishers have experimented with business models alternative to the BPC (Book Processing Charges) based model, and libraries in large numbers have supported Open Access (OA) book publishing with financial contributions. We have also seen global interest in our OA Books Toolkit which tells me that the topic is increasingly relevant to authors, libraries, research institutions, publishers, funders etc. This has also been witnessed through the engagement provided via the OA Books Network. While OA to books for many years was a rather marginalised topic, I think it is true to say that it has now become a hot topic.

Read the Complete Interview with Niels Stern (1266 words)