5.1 Working towards Open Access for Monographs – A Pilot with UK Universities

At the 2014 Annual Conference, a paper presented the development and rationale of the OAPEN deposit service for Open Access monographs. This paper will focus on the practical implementation of these services in the context of a pilot project that was launched in September in the UK by OAPEN Foundation and JISC Collections, in close collaboration with several universities, university libraries and university presses.

Building on use cases, the pilot project will set up and test central services designed to support and encourage the production and dissemination of high-quality OA scholarly monographs. It focuses on four key areas that are particularly relevant to those involved in scholarly communication within the university library: quality assurance; aggregation and deposit; dissemination and discovery; and management information. The project is due to report in September/October 2015.

This session offers delegates an early view of the services that are being developed and the opportunity to comment on them and to discuss preliminary findings. Delegates will be informed about the state of Open Access for monographs, the potential for centralised services supporting OA monographs, and the relevance of these services for their institutes.

Eelco Ferwerda is Director of OAPEN, a foundation dedicated to OA books. He has been active in the area of Open Access for monographs since 2008, when he started managing OAPEN as EU co-funded project with six European university presses. Before that he worked as Publisher of digital publications at Amsterdam University Press. Before joining AUP in 2002, he worked in various new media subsidiaries at the former Dutch newspaper publisher PCM, lastly as Manager Business Development for PCM Interactive Media. In 2013, he organised a conference about OA monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences, together with Caren Milloy of JISC Collections and hosted by the British Library. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA). He is co-founder of the Association of European University Presses (AEUP, 2010) and of the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), which he launched with Lars Björnshauge in 2012.