Requirements & Application

Publishers are invited to provide the metadata of their open access academic books to DOAB. DOAB is open to all publishers provided that they meet our requirements.

We define open access academic books as scholarly peer-reviewed books including monographs, book chapters, edited collections, critical editions, and other long-form scholarly works that are available online under an open access licence (such a Creative Commons licence) at no cost to the user or without any registration requirements.

Requirements

The current main requirements to take part in DOAB are twofold:

• Academic books in DOAB shall be available under an open access licence (such as a Creative Commons licence)
• 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’s website. DOAB aims to develop an authoritative list of open access (OA) book publishers and we recommend publishers to follow OASPA’s membership guidelines to ensure high standards of OA book publishing. You can consult these requirements here (under ‘books’): http://oaspa.org/membership/membership-criteria/

We recommend that you take these guidelines into consideration in presenting your organisation on your website.

Application

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