Welcome to the OAPEN OA Books toolkit

This toolkit is a free-to-access resource that aims to help academic book authors to better understand open access book publishing, and to promote and increase trust in open access books. This toolkit may also be of use to stakeholders including publishers, universities, research funders and research institutions.

The Open Access Books Toolkit is a global and multi-stakeholder initiative. The toolkit is hosted by OAPEN. A broad and diverse Editorial Advisory Board is involved in the development and maintenance of the toolkit, including authors, publishers, research support staff, funders and other key stakeholders.

The idea for this toolkit originated from a workshop session organised by Springer Nature and the University of Glasgow as part of the Researcher to Reader Conference in 2019. From there on, the idea of an open access books toolkit was further developed through a series of workshops for authors hosted at the universities of Oxford, Glasgow and Utrecht in collaboration with OAPEN and Springer Nature.

We are grateful for the generous support for the toolkit we have received from the following organisations and we invite you to join them.

PALOMERA – Policy Alignment of Open Access Monographs in the European Research Area – is a two-year EU-funded project unifying 16 partners across Europe to investigate the current landscape of scholarly book publishing and in particular the bottlenecks in strategies and policies for their open access.