Improving the quality of assessing and onboarding open book publishers globally to the Directory of Open Access Books
Funding Area: Capacity building / Construcción de capacidad
Problem Statement: The acceleration of open book publishing is evidenced by the rapid growth of the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) which currently indexes over 68,000 peer reviewed open access (OA) books making it a truly global hub for peer reviewed OA books. The requirements (most prominently peer reviewed books (monographs, edited collections, etc. with an open licence) for publishers who want to join DOAB means that libraries, institutions and research funders increasingly refer to DOAB as a trusted source for open quality publications. This role and the growth of DOAB puts pressure on this critical, open infrastructure to strengthening its internal workflows and guidelines for evaluation of publisher applications to become part of DOAB. To build this capacity DOAB is inspired by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and would like to be inspired by their amazing work on application management. While important differences exist between books and journals knowledge transfer and exchange between these two not-for-profit open infrastructures could be a first step to address the positive problem of more publishers (globally) applying to become part of DOAB.
Proposed Activities: (1) Documentation of current DOAB evaluation criteria, guidelines, and workflows. (2) Preparation of in-person workshop. (3) 3 days in-person workshop with professional facilitation involving all team members involved in the evaluation and onboarding of publishers who apply to become part of DOAB. (4) Updated DOAB evaluation criteria, guidelines, and workflows (internal and public) (5) Workshop report, including recommendations for next steps and global engagement in quality assessment.
Openness: Running on an open source DSpace platform, DOAB provides all the metadata fully open (CC0) to the community. The DOAB metadata is very easy for libraries to integrate into their catalogues either directly through an open API, through metadata feeds or through activation in the library’s preferred knowledge base. This way, libraries can free of charge and without any registration make the thousands of OA books indexed in DOAB available to their patrons. And not only libraries of course, anyone can visit DOAB and explore the vast literature for free and without any registration requirements. As part of the project DOAB will update its evaluation criteria and onboarding workflows publicly. Furthermore, the workshop report will be made available public and be summarised in a public blog post.
Challenges: We are quite confident that we are able to manage this project. The real challenge lies ahead of us but this project will act as a first step that will help prepare for future bigger projects.
Neglectedness: Not aware of other sources. Have not applied for funding for this work before.
Success: Improved application evaluation guidelines and workflow described for DOAB and adopted by the team. Recommendations for future work outlined as part of the workshop report. Stronger relations between DOAB and DOAJ.
Total Budget: US$ 20,000
Budget File: pdf
Affiliations: Stichting DOAB
LMIE Carveout: The project only falls within this category in so far as the the management of application evaluation particularly needs updating due to increased DOAB engagement with publishers in LMIE. We are proactively engaging in regions like Africa to help fostering a more equitable OA publishing landscape.
Team Skills: DOAB is co-managed by Pierre Mounier and Niels Stern, both have 20+ years of experience in publishing, open access, infrastructures and scholarly communication in general. DOAB is operated by the OAPEN Foundation team, https://www.oapen.org/oapen/7664742-team (which will be extended with two colleagues in August). The team has strong knowledge in technology, community management, scientific management, and communication.
How Did You Hear About This Call: Word of mouth (e.g. conversations and emails from IOI staff, friends, colleagues, etc.) / Boca a boca (por ejemplo, conversaciones y correos electrónicos del personal del IOI, amigos, colegas, etc.)
Submission Number: 15
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