Published 12 December 2023

Story of this toolkit

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. This workshop aimed to answer two key questions:

  • How do we increase uptake for open access books and chapters?
  • What are the challenges and opportunities associated with open access for books?

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. Further involvement by Research Consulting has been instrumental in shaping the concept for the toolkit. The response from these sessions resulted in the current version of the OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit: a free-to-access, stakeholder-agnostic resource that aims to help academic book authors to better understand and increase trust in open access book publishing.

We would like to thank the universities of Oxford, Glasgow and Utrecht for facilitating these workshops and for their support which has enabled us to create this toolkit.

Toolkit updates

The first version of the OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit was made public on September 30th, 2020. The toolkit will be regularly updated. Each toolkit article includes a “date of last update” stamp.

Support

OAPEN invites stakeholders in scholarly communication to help cover costs for ongoing maintenance and further development of the toolkit. For more information on how you can support the toolkit please read ‘Support the toolkit’ (See Support the toolkit).

If you would like to receive project updates about the OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit, please sign up to the newsletter here.

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

Last edited on 12 December 2023, at 06:31 (+0000)