This toolkit is aimed at promoting and supporting open access to academic books. It consists of short articles covering a wide range of topics relating to open access books, each including a list of sources referenced, further reading and links to definitions of key terms.
The toolkit has two main sections. One section is for researchers as authors of academic books and aims at helping authors to better understand open access book publishing and to increase trust in open access books. The other section is aimed at policymakers and provides a resource to support policy development for open access books. Taken together, the articles should also be of interest to the wider range of stakeholders with an interest in open access books publishing and policy.
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 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.
This article is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.