Addressing the recent issues with DOAB

Silke Davison

Thu 05 Sep 2024

Read this article at hypothèses.org

The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) is an independent, not-for-profit index of  peer-reviewed open access books. Our current collection consists of 86,000+ titles from 750+ publishers and in 100+ languages.  

Lately, we have received feedback on a disruption to DOAB, noticing the website takes a while to load, times out, or even crashes. We apologise to anyone who has experienced any inconvenience. This is due to a server capacity overload. Put simply: DOAB is too large for the environment it currently runs on.  

To solve this more structural issue and provide you with an improved service, we have struck an exciting partnership with the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN), see the announcement from March, and we currently are in the process of migrating our services  to the CERN Data Center. We hope to finalise this move by the end of September. 

We value our community of stakeholders and users and share in your frustration. We thank you for your continued patience with us as we navigate this challenge and move the entire DOAB (and OAPEN) environment to CERN’s Data Center.