Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) relaunches on DSpace

26/03/2021

The DOAB Foundation is pleased to share that the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) has successfully migrated to a new open source environment, based on DSpace 6.

DOAB is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to over 34,000 scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books. Following the migration, all its services remain free of charge with all data being freely available.

The entire DOAB team is very excited about this development. Transitioning to the open source DSpace platform represents an important next step for the DOAB Foundation and our firm commitment to open science.

Niels Stern, Director of OAPEN and co-director of DOAB

The transition of DOAB to an open source environment comes at a time where momentum for OA books is on the rise and access to scholarly books is proving to be of critical importance to users worldwide. The renewed DOAB platform offers additional functionalities and features, improving the service for all stakeholders.

From just over 10,000 books in 2018, DOAB has grown impressively to over 36,000 in March 2021, from more than 400 Publishers. Most of the DOAB contents are licensed under a Creative Commons license. Aside from English books, a growing number of titles is available in French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian and other languages.

I am happy that DOAB offers the same integration possibilities as the OAPEN Library. The renewed DOAB platform enables libraries, data aggregators and others to make use of several metadata feeds, OAI harvesting options and connect their applications directly through an API.

Ronald Snijder, Deputy Director at OAPEN Foundation

The migration of DOAB to a robust, community-driven, open system such as DSpace, is a milestone in the development of the service. Thanks to the funding coming from the European Commission and the hosting service provided by Huma-Num, DOAB is in an even better position to support bibliodiversity in the open access landscape. The renewed platform provides a sound basis for the future development of the OPERAS certification service that will bring more trust in OA books.

Pierre Mounier, Coordinator of OPERAS and co-director of DOAB

Even though institutional repositories based on DSpace are commonly associated with green open access to peer reviewed articles, originally published in journals, the growing success of open access licensing to manuscripts has become a fundamental asset for researchers in the Open Science landscape. Our entire team is proud of our contribution to the success of open access books, through our involvement in the OAPEN and DOAB transitions to DSpace.

Benoît Wéry, Atmire

About DOAB

DOAB, The Directory of Open Access Books is a service of the DOAB Foundation. The DOAB Foundation is a non-profit legal entity under Dutch law (‘stichting’), established by the OAPEN Foundation and OpenEdition. DOAB is currently developing a certification service for OA books as part of the OPERAS research infrastructure.

About Atmire

Atmire accelerates scientific progress through open access repositories. As an independent company, Atmire is a service provider for the open source platform DSpace. The company assists higher education institutions, NGOs, non-profits and divisions of government in their initiatives to make research results available online.

Both very small libraries, as well as leading institutions including Harvard University and MIT, work with Atmire, thanks to varied offering of low cost SaaS repository services, and higher end custom development.

Contact Atmire today, to share your ambitions for your repository collections.