Knowledge Bases

This guide has been designed by Lancaster University to provide an introduction to Open Access Book Publishing. Each section of the resource will introduce you to key themes related to Open Access Book publishing, make you aware of key considerations and provide you with useful resources to explore topics in more detail.

The resource can either be used as a reference guide and users can navigate directly to the topics they think relevant, or it can be utilised as a short online course with users working through each section individually.

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A comprehensive online resource created by Copim’s Experimental Publishing Group bringing together tools, practices, and books to promote and support the publication of experimental book publications. It shows the advantages and opportunities that online publishing can offer for innovative collaboration, interactions and experimentations.

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The Library Partnership Rating is a collaborative and library-developed framework for librarians who seek to quantify the alignment of publishers with themselves as they consider investing library resources. It was first developed by Rachel Caldwell at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Robin Sinn at Iowa State University, although it now has a large advisory council made up of several libraries and publishers.

The current iteration of the rubric, which has been adopted and adapted by many libraries as they consider OA investment offers (among other resource requests from publishers), covers journals specifically. However, a working group is currently aiming to expand its coverage to books. As it is primarily a US-focussed resource, librarians in other regions wishing to adopt a similar rubric may need to localise some parts of it.

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The Open Access Directory (OAD) is a wiki / compendium of simple factual lists about open access (OA) to science and scholarship, maintained by the OA community at large. While very journal-focussed it does have some book and wider OA lists/information.

It contains lists and data that is not replicated in other resources but would be interesting to some, e.g. around the history of open access. It is more relevant for those interested in open access in and of itself than many other listed resources. 

However, its information is out of date in some highly relevant places such as OA book business models, which was a page last updated in 2020 and which is missing recent developments. 

See the directory

A new feature in Jisc's Open policy finder (formerly Sherpa services, a toolsuite of resources for journals), this is a policy-finder developed to support the UKRI OA policy for longform.

It is still relatively new (released in beta early 2024 with a limited number of publisher data sets included) but this is increasing following the move to live release in autumn 2024. It has strong sector and funder support. 

Use the tool

A German language (English option available) online summary info hub on OA books. Comprehensive coverage of all things OA but content probably covered in other resources. 

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The Knowledge Base is a collection of documents, such as reports, policies, survey results and statistics, relevant to Open Access (OA) policies regarding OA books in the European Research Area. The collection was created as part of the PALOMERA project.

It is an unparalleled resource in terms of providing a centralised hub for OA documents from across the ERA in a range of languages, varying greatly in scope from individual publisher guidelines to national mandates. 

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