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.

The first version of the OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit was made public on September 30th, 2020.

The Palomera Project

The toolkit was redeveloped as part of PALOMERA, a project to improve policy alignment for open access to academic books in the European Research Area (ERA). Based on the outcomes of Palomera, the Toolkit was extended with a new section for Policy makers. This section provides a resource to support policy development for OA books.

The Open Access Books Toolkit was subsequently relaunched on its fourth birthday, on September 30th, 2024.

Toolkit Updates

The toolkit will be regularly updated. Each toolkit article includes a “Revised” stamp that indicates the last time the article was updated.

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