BTAA and DOAB & OAPEN Agreement

In 2021 the Big Ten Academic Alliance entered into a three-year collective action agreement (July 2021-June 2024) with the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and the Open Access Library and Publication Platform (OAPEN) to provide financial support from all fifteen member libraries.

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

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 premium services to publishers, libraries, and funders including metadata enhancement, usage analytics, and digital preservation.

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.

Participating Institutions
University of Chicago
University of Illinois
Indiana University
University of Iowa
University of Maryland–College Park
University of Michigan
Michigan State University
University of Minnesota
University of Nebraska
Northwestern University
Ohio State University
Pennsylvania State University
Purdue University
Rutgers University
University of Wisconsin