Published 16 December 2021

Welcome to the OAPEN Open Access 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. To learn more about this toolkit please continue reading.

The OAPEN open access books toolkit offers a coherent set of more than 30 individual articles addressing various topics related to open access books such as:

  • What is open access?
  • Common misconceptions about open access
  • Copyright and licensing
  • Funding
  • Quality assurance
  • Publishing options
  • Discoverability & impact

There are several ways to navigate the toolkit, access articles and find relevant information. To learn more about these options please read ‘How to browse this toolkit’ (See How to browse this toolkit?).

Governance

The OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit is governed by a global team of stakeholders representing the research community, publishers, open access organisations, funders and research support. This resource strives to be an authoritative, credible and stakeholder-agnostic resource for users worldwide. To enable continuous updates and credibility, the toolkit is governed by an Editorial Advisory Board and chaired by OAPEN. The board provides editorial support, which includes identifying new resources, suggesting changes and maintaining regular update cycles (see Who is responsible for this toolkit?).

We also note that the toolkit might cover terms that are subject to discussion and may alter over time. Changes can be considered as part of the regular update cycles and we are open to suggestions and recommendations for developing this resource further (See Help & feedback).

If you would like to receive project updates about the toolkit, please sign up to the OAPEN open access books toolkit newsletter here.

About OAPEN

OAPEN promotes and supports the transition to open access for academic books by providing open infrastructure services to stakeholders in scholarly communication. We work with publishers to build a quality-controlled collection of open access books via the OAPEN Library and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), which are freely accessible to readers worldwide. Furthermore, OAPEN provides services for publishers, libraries and research funders in the areas of hosting, deposit, quality assurance, dissemination, and digital preservation.

Creative Commons License
This article is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Last edited on 16 December 2021, at 10:08 (+0000)