Open Access Books Network
The Open Access Books Network (OABN) Special Interest Group is an open and community-led network for anyone interested in open access (OA) books. The OABN is a dedicated community where we can learn, share knowledge and best practices, discuss and develop the future of open access book publishing. We engage in activities including workshops and webinars; share resources such as videos, toolkits, and blog posts; and interact on our discussion boards, at online meetings and in other forums.
Objective of the Special Interest Group
The OABN brings together publishers, researchers, librarians, infrastructure providers and other stakeholders who are interested in open access book publishing. It advocates for open access to books, collates news, views resources and developments specifically relevant for OA books and connects a global community in the form of blogs, events, workshops and other activities.
The transition to open access publishing for books and journals, a key aspect of open scholarly communication, is taking place at different speeds. Academic book publishing has its own set of needs, challenges and opportunities to successfully become part of a thriving open scholarly communications landscape, which frequently differ from those faced by journal publishing. As a mode of scholarly communication, the academic book is vital for research communities, especially in SSH subjects. It is typically viewed as the most significant publication format within these disciplines, rather than the journal article – particularly as, for these subjects, the long-form writing process is often a way to develop the research, and not only a way to communicate it. It is therefore essential that books are published open access in an equitable and affordable way, so that we do not create a future in which STEM research is openly available, while SSH publications are locked away.
The main purpose of the OABN is to act as a place to bring together people who are interested in open access books for the purposes of knowledge-sharing, discussion, and exploring new ideas. For more information about our current activities, see our website and/or sign up to our Mailing List.
A brief history
The idea for the Open Access Books Network was born in 2019. During the ElPub conference, a group of experts were discussing all things OA books. If only we could do this more often, they thought!
Well here, they do.
Officially launched in 2020 by members of SPARC Europe, ScholarLed, OPERAS and the OAPEN Foundation, the OABN is currently coordinated by Lucy Barnes (Open Book Publishers) and Silke Davison (OAPEN). The OABN runs a wide range of activities, including our boOkmArks events exploring new developments in OA books, our blog covering key topics in OA books, our OA Mythbusters video collection, OA Workouts talks featuring authors discussing their OA publications, and discussion forums including our Humanities Commons boards and our Open Cafe events.
To date, the OABN has run these activities thanks to staff time donated by the founding organisations, the ingenuity and dedication of its coordinators who make things happen without a budget, the infrastructural support of Humanities Commons, and the engagement, knowledge and enthusiasm of our SIG members and the international OA books community who participate in our activities. We hope that our participation in OPERAS as a SIG will generate new ideas and enable us to develop stronger relationships with OPERAS members, and to take the time to think more deeply with the OABN community about how the network might play a role in the future of open access books over the coming years.
Contact
The OABN is an open network that invites the community to participate in and help to direct its activities. It is a loosely organised network, where we interact with our communities in different ways, including (but not limited to) our website, Humanities Commons, X (Twitter), YouTube, our Mailing List and our events. Our coordinating team can be found listed on our website and the members of our Humanities Commons group can be found here. You may email the coordinators at info@oabooksnetwork.org to get in touch directly, but you are also warmly invited to join the network and to participate in our activities. The coordinators are Silke Davison and Lucy Barnes.
Special Interest Group Members
Andrea Davidson – SPARC Europe, Coordinator Open Access Books Network
Andrea Davidson is Open Science and Open Education Communication and Engagement Leader at SPARC Europe, a foundation that initiates, facilitates, and supports initiatives to open access to scholarly research and education across Europe. She is an experienced project manager and community coordinator, having worked previously on humanities research projects at the University of Antwerp and Open Education projects at Toronto Metropolitan University Library.
Lucy Barnes – Open Book Publishers, Coordinator Open Access Books Network
Lucy Barnes is Senior Editor and Outreach Coordinator at Open Book Publishers, a leading independent non-profit Open Access book publisher. She does outreach work for COPIM and is on the board of the ScholarLed collective and the OA Books Toolkit. You can find her on Twitter @alittleroad.
Silke Davison – Community Manager at OAPEN and the DOAB, Coordinator Open Access Books Network
Silke Davison is Community Manager at OAPEN and the DOAB, where she is responsible for the development of and engagement with their library communities, seeking to promote and support the transition to open access for academic books. Prior to this, she worked at Frontiers and Springer Nature, and completed an MA in Publishing at UCL.
Anna Hughes – Jisc
Anna Hughes is a Scholarly communications and engagement officer at Jisc (the UK digital, data and technology agency focused on tertiary education, research and innovation), and is currently leading the communications, marketing and engagement activity associated with the delivery of the Jisc/UK Research and Innovation’s open access policy programme, a two-year body of work to implement UKRI’s new open access policy. With over 15 years’ experience in higher education support, Anna has specialist knowledge of the open research and research publishing landscape, with experience in leading and delivering large scale engagement programmes for researchers, libraries, research offices, funders and publishers. She is a member of the UKSG Outreach and Engagement Committee.
Andrea Hacker – University Library, Bern
Andrea Hacker joined the Open Science Team of the University Library Bern in 2018 where she focuses on issues of financing Open Access and building new infrastructure for Open Access content. This includes Bern Open Publishing (BOP) which recently began to publish books. She has 15 years of experience in open access scholarly publishing. From 2008 to 2018 she worked at Heidelberg University where she built an open access journal and an open access book series; she also significantly contributed to the establishment of heiUP (Heidelberg University Publishing).
Andreas Ferus – Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna
Andreas Ferus is working at the library and also as a lecturer at the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies as well as the Institute for Conservation-Restoration of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and doing research and teaching in Library and Information Studies, especially on Open Scholarship/Open Science & Scholarly Communication. Projects that he is currently involved in are: “Austrian Transition to Open Access 2 (AT2OA2)” (https://www.at2oa.at/at2oa2_home.html), “Shared RDM Services and Infrastructure (Shared RDM)” (https://forschungsdaten.at/en/sharedrdm/), “RIS Synergy” (https://forschungsdaten.at/ris/), and Austrian Research Information & Service Network (ARI&Snet)” (https://forschungsdaten.at/arisnet/) etc.
Claire Redhead – Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA)
Claire is Executive Director of OASPA, a membership organisation representing a diverse community of organisations engaged in open scholarlship, including open access books, journals, infrastructures and service providers. Claire has worked for over 20 years in academic publishing, with the past decade focussed on open access at OASPA and leading the organisation since 2016. Claire sits on a number of working groups and committees to represent the views of the open access publishing community and is Chair of the OA Switchboard.
Eric Hellman – Free Ebook Foundation
Eric Hellman is President of the Free Ebook Foundation. After 10 years doing physics research at Bell Labs, Eric got interested in electronic publishing, started an e-journal, started a company, built linking technology for libraries, joined OCLC for a few years, started writing (at Go To Hellman), and since, has been trying to make free ebooks work better for libraries and everyone else.
Fulvio Guatelli – Firenze University Press
Fulvio Guatelli, PhD, Director of Firenze University Press (www.fupress.com), was seduced in his youth by the philosophy of Bertrand Russell, the philosophy of language and logic. With the approach of a philosopher he took an interest in the mechanisms of academic publishing and the development of new criteria for assessment and dissemination of science. Since 2006 he has been working at Firenze University Press where he has been able to experiment pioneering activities in the field of academic publishing. He has conceived the project “FUP Scientific Cloud for Books” in which the new digital book is characterized by a deep interaction between content and metadata capable of ensuring high indexes of dissemination and impact of monographs. Publications: https://www.unifi.it/p-doc2-2017-000000-G-3f2b3a30382a2f-0.html.
Graham Stone – Jisc
Graham Stone is Jisc’s subject matter expert for OA monographs. He is the lead for communications on OA monographs within Jisc and with members and stakeholders and is responsible for developing and managing strategic relationships in the UK and internationally. Before joining Jisc, he worked in the university sector for 23 years managing library resources budgets, OA services and a University Press.
Hanna Lahdenperä – Federation of Finnish Learned Societies
Hanna Lahdenperä holds a PhD in Nordic literature from the University of Helsinki. She has a background in trade publishing and is now a Senior Expert at the Open Science and Research Secretariat of the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies. The Secretariat supports the Finnish Open Science and Research Coordination, and Lahdenperä specialises in open access and responsible evaluation.
Iva Melinscak Zlodi – University of Zagreb Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Iva Melinščak Zlodi is a scholarly communication librarian at the University of Zagreb Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences where she leads the development of the institutional OA book platform FF Open Press. She has experience with initiating and developing the Croatian national journals platform Hrčak and repository network Dabar, and is currently preoccupied with launching the Croatian initiative for open scholarly books. She is a member of the Board of Directors of SPARC Europe.
Jesper Boserup Thestrup – Royal Danish Library
Jesper Boserup Thestrup started to work with Open Access in 2008 at the Royal Danish Library, as a part of the team operating a local Open Journal System (OJS) server, with a focus on Aarhus University. In 2017, the server merged into the national OJS Open Access platform, tidsskrift.dk. In 2015, he was part of the team, which established and Open Monograph Press (OMP) server focused on publications written by researchers from Aarhus University. This has given Jesper Boserup Thestrup insight in the problems OA publication of e-books and journals gives editors and authors and how to solve many of these problems.
Katarina Smitt Engberg – Royal Danish Library
Katarina Smitt Engberg holds a PhD in Musicology from University of Copenhagen. Since 2022, she has been working with Open Access and Open Science at the Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen University Library. She is part of the support team for the national publishing platform for journals, tidsskrift.dk, and is involved in the establishment of a national Open Access platform for scholarly books.
Katarina Wiberg – National Library of Sweden
Katarina Wiberg works as Open Access Officer at the National Library of Sweden (Kungliga biblioteket, KB) with KB’s coordinating task for Open Access to scholarly publications. She is currently also project manager for the goverment directive to develop national guidelines for Open Science. She represents Sweden (NOAD) in OpenAIRE and is a member of the Open Library of Humanities Library Board. Katarina has previously worked as Senior Analyst at the Swedish Library Association with focus on research libraries, copyright and digital privacy. She has also worked as Research Officer at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm and as Programme Director at the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (STINT). Her educational background is the Cultural Studies Program at Stockholm University with focus on Archaeology. She has also studied Archival Sciences at the Mid Sweden University.
Niels Stern – OAPEN Foundation
Niels Stern has worked in scholarly publishing for more than twenty years. Since 2014 he has also acted as an independent expert for the European Commission on open science and e-infrastructures. He is a member of the OPERAS Executive Assembly and the Vice-chair of the Open Book Collective Board of Stewards and serves on a number of advisory boards and committees. ORCID: 0000-0001-6466-9748
Rupert Gatti – Open Book Publishers
Dr Rupert Gatti is a co-founder and Director of three non-profit open access book initiatives: Open Book Publishers, Thoth Open Metadata and the Open Book Collective. He is a founding member of the Open Access Book Network (now an OPERAS SIG). He is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he is a Director of Studies in Economics. His published academic work includes microeconomic analysis of competition and pricing in online and digital markets. He has been involved in a number of UK- and EU-funded OA book initiatives, including the HIRMEOS and PALOMERA projects within OPERAS, and the UKRI- and Arcadia-funded COPIM and Open Book Futures projects.
Vanessa Proudman – SPARC Europe
Vanessa Proudman is Director of SPARC Europe; she is working to make Open the default in Europe. She has 20 years of international experience working on Open Access, Open Science, Open Culture and Open Education with many leading universities and libraries worldwide from over 20 countries. She is an experienced project and programme manager of EC projects for universities, their libraries, for foundations and led a dept of info and IT at a UN-European region research organisation for well over 10 years.
Sharla Lair
Sharla Lair serves as a Senior Strategist of Open Access and Scholarly Communication Initiatives at LYRASIS. Since 2015, Sharla’s role at LYRASIS has been to negotiate the best pricing and licensing terms for the products and services available to LYRASIS members as well as seek out new programs that demonstrate transformative influence in the scholarly communication landscape. She is particularly interested in better understanding the dynamics around making scholarly publishing more sustainable through explorations in community building, open access, and building more equitable and inclusive revenue models. Sharla serves on several working groups and committees and is Chair of the Open Access eBook Usage Data Trust Board of Trustees.
OABN Emeritrix
Here we list people who have made significant contributions to the OABN but are not currently active SIG members: with sincere thanks for all their support of the OABN!
Tom Mosterd
Agata Morka
Jeroen Sondervan