Big Ten Academic Alliance and Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and OAPEN Library and Publication Platform (OAPEN) Announce a Three-Year Collective Action Agreement

The Big Ten Academic Alliance has entered into a three-year collective action agreement with the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and OAPEN Library and Publication Platform (OAPEN) to provide financial support from all fifteen member libraries.

The BTAA is delighted to take collective action on behalf of its members to support the work DOAB and OAPEN whose mission is to, “build a collection of scholarly OA books and provide services for libraries, publishers, and research funders in the areas of discoverability, hosting, deposit, quality assurance, dissemination, and digital preservation.&rdquo

With this agreement, the libraries of the BTAA affirm their principled commitment to open scholarship for worldwide public good and a more equitable society.

DOAB is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides a searchable and browsable directory of nearly 42,000 peer-reviewed books from more than 600 publishers worldwide. These services and data (CC0) are free of charge and easy to integrate into library catalogues. OAPEN is an open repository to more than 16,000 full-text open access books and provides a number of premium services to publishers, libraries, and funders including metadata enhancement, usage analytics, and digital preservation.

The Big Ten Academic Alliance members are: Indiana University, Michigan State University, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University, Rutgers University–New Brunswick, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, University of Iowa, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the University of Chicago.

“We are very grateful that the BTAA members have chosen to support DOAB and OAPEN jointly. Their collective action is a significant contribution to the further development of our open infrastructure services for scholarly books. The agreement is also a big and important step forward for our engagement in the United States,” said Niels Stern, director of the OAPEN Foundation.

“Our libraries are seeking to build a strategic portfolio of investments in sustainable open infrastructure to support the growth of open science and open scholarship. We are very pleased to join DOAB and OAPEN into that portfolio, and to take this joint action to support the important benefits their services have for our scholars and researchers,” said Maurice York, Director of Library Initiatives for the Big Ten Academic Alliance.

About the Big Ten Academic Alliance: The Big Ten Academic Alliance is the nation’s preeminent model for effective collaboration among research universities. For more than half a century, these world-class institutions have advanced their academic missions, generated unique opportunities for students and faculty, and served the common good by sharing expertise, leveraging campus resources, and collaborating on innovative programs. Governed and funded by the Provosts of the member universities, Big Ten Academic Alliance mandates are coordinated by a staff from its Champaign, Illinois headquarters.

About 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 OAPEN: OAPEN is a not-for-profit foundation dedicated to open access books. OAPEN works with publishers to build a quality-controlled collection of open access books through the OAPEN Library, and provides services for publishers, libraries, and research funders in the areas of deposit, quality assurance, dissemination, and digital preservation. OAPEN is also hosting the OA Books Toolkit which is a free-to-access resource that aims to help academic book authors to better understand open access book publishing, and to promote and increase trust in open access books. The toolkit may also be of use to libraries, research support teams, and academic publishers.