Useful Resources

On this page, we’ve gathered together information about resources (including documents, toolkits and platforms) and organisations providing support for open access publishing in different ways. We hope this list of resources will be useful both for OIPA member organisations and anyone interested in finding out more about open access publishing.

Resources:

RESHAPED: Open Access in the Humanities – University of London Press with the School of Advanced Study have launched a course that offers an introduction to open access publishing for humanities researchers at all career stages, as well as students, librarians and research support staff. It is divided into three interactive, accessible 20–30 minute modules covering what open access is; models, funding and licensing; and how to make your publications open access. It provides the practical information needed to navigate today’s open access landscape. It is possible to create an account on the platform, or you can access it as a guest with no login required.

OpenPlato – OpenAIRE’s flagship learning platform for Open Science, Research Data Management, and the FAIR principles. It brings together curated self-paced content, thematic modules, and trainer resources across a wide range of topics.

Open Book Environment Dashboard – The Open Book Environment (OBE) Dashboard is a joint initiative from the Universities of Derby and Vermont that provides information on open access book publishers, detailing the transparency of their fees and policies. The Dashboard is intended to help researchers looking to find a suitable publisher and give librarians an overview of the open book publishing landscape.

Useful organisations, projects and platforms:

• Open Access Books Network (OABN) – this is a forum for researchers, publishers, librarians, funders, infrastructure providers and anyone interested in open access books to engage in discussions and events and access a wealth of helpful material.
• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) – the DOAJ is a unique index of diverse open access journals from around the world with a mission to increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, open access scholarly research journals globally.
• Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) – the DOAB is a community-driven discovery service led by OpenEdition and the OAPEN Foundation that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books and helps users to find trusted open access book publishers.
• Peer Review Information System for Monographs (PRISM) – PRISM is a service provided by DOAB as part of the OPERAS service catalogue, and offers a standardised and transparent way for academic publishers to display information about their peer review processes across their entire catalogue.
• OAPEN online library and publishing platform – OAPEN, funded by the OAPEN Foundation, provides open infrastructure services to stakeholders in scholarly communication to promote and support the transition to open access for academic books. The platform works with publishers to build a quality-controlled collection of open access books and provide services for publishers, libraries and research funders in the areas of hosting, deposit, quality assurance, dissemination and digital preservation.
• COPIM project (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs) – this project, funded by Arcadia and Research England, produced a wealth of useful reports and outputs on revenue and business models, governance, dissemination, archiving, metadata and experimental publishing. 
• Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) – OASPA is a diverse community of organisations engaged in open scholarship with a mission to encourage and enable open access as the predominant model of communication for scholarly outputs.
• Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) – COPE brings together all those involved in scholarly research and its publication to strengthen the network of support, education and debate in publication ethics, and offers a range of materials designed to help ethical practice become a normal part of the culture of publishing.
• Association of University Presses (AUP) – AUP is a membership organisation of nonprofit scholarly publishers, publishing to high editorial and professional standards.
• Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) – the LPC is an independent, community-led membership association of academic and research libraries and library consortia engaged in scholarly publishing. Their website features a range of useful materials, including ‘An Ethical Framework for Library Publishing’ (see link in ‘Resources’ above).
• Association of European University Presses (AEUP) – the AEUP is an organisation of and for university presses across Europe to help them build stronger relationships between them, to co-operate and share knowledge in order to reach common goals and to jointly address important issues in publishing.
• DIAMAS project (Developing Institutional Open Access Publishing Models to Advance Scholarly Communication) – funded by the European Union, this project gathers 23 organisations from 12 European countries, well-versed in open access academic publishing and scholarly communication, to work on the challenges faces by institutional publishing such as visibility and sustainability.
• The Publishers Learning and Community Exchange (PLACE) – this is a helpful forum offering information on publishing processes and standards, developed by a coalition of Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), Crossref, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA).

Events

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News

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