For publishers

DOAB for publishers

The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) is a discovery service for Open Access monographs. DOAB provides a searchable index to peer-reviewed monographs and edited volumes published under an Open Access business model, with links to the full texts of the publications at the publisher’s website or repository.

Academic publishers are invited to provide the metadata of their Open Access books to the DOAB. Metadata are harvestable in order to maximize dissemination, visibility and impact. Aggregators can integrate the records in their commercial services and libraries can integrate the directory into their online catalogues, thereby helping scholars, students and the general public to discover the books. DOAB is open to all academic publishers: The directory aims to cover all subject areas and all languages and should contain as many books as possible.

Requirements

DOAB determines requirements for participation by publishers, in consultation with the participating publishers and the DOAB Advisory Board. The current requirements have been specified by the OAPEN Foundation in consultation with OASPA. The current requirements to take part in DOAB are twofold:

  • Academic books in DOAB shall be available under an Open Access license (such as a Creative Commons license)
  • Academic books in DOAB shall be subjected to independent and external peer review prior to publication
The policies and procedures regarding peer review and licensing should be clearly outlined on the publisher web site. More information about these requirements can be found in the Statement on Open Access (Appendix II of the OASPA bylaws).

Application

Publishers who wish to take part in DOAB must fill in the application form. Use this form to describe the license policy (or policies) and the peer review procedures. This information is reviewed by DOAB. After approval publishers get access to DOAB admin tool which enables uploading the books.

Upload procedures

Publishers are responsible for their own information about their company and their publications. They are requested to upload the information about their books themselves. Publishers receive an account where they can upload and edit their information.

There are two basic methods to upload the metadata of books:

  • book by book, through an online form.
  • in bulk, by creating a file with the information in a specified format.
    The specifications of the fields to use can be downloaded here. For more information, see: DOAB Metadata.
The Directory of Open Access Books is a service of OAPEN Foundation. Please use the Contact form if you have any feedback or questions.