OAPEN and UKRI enter partnership for funded OA books

The Hague, The Netherlands, 6 December 2024. The OAPEN Foundation is delighted to announce that it has entered into a partnership collaboration with UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) to provide a set of dedicated services for its funded open access (OA) books.

On 1 January 2024, UKRI extended their open access policy to include all in-scope monographs, book chapters, and edited collections published on or after that date. They also launched a new fund dedicated to supporting open access costs for monographs, book chapters, and edited collections within the scope of their new policy. Under the terms of this partnership collaboration, all OA books funded by UKRI will be made available in the OAPEN Library as a funded collection through the OAPEN Funder Services from January 2025.

Niels Stern, managing Director of the OAPEN Foundation says, “I am delighted that UKRI has chosen an open infrastructure provider like OAPEN to support the implementation of their OA book policy. UKRI has put a lot of effort into developing their policy and I am excited that we can now help them boost the impact of their work through our funder services that include collecting, distributing, reporting on, and preserving the OA books funded by them.”

OAPEN Funder Services have been set up to support open access policies of research funders, research institutions, universities, and their libraries. OAPEN provides an institutional uploading service for researchers and publishers and is adapted to the specific demands for academic books, making use of the existing metadata standards, classification schemes, and distribution channels for academic books. OAPEN provides Funder Services to Wellcome, the Austrian Science Foundation (FWF), Knowledge Unlatched (KU), the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Dutch Research Council (NWO), SCOAP3 for Books, and the European Research Council (ERC).

Rachel Bruce, Head of Open Research at UKRI says: “At UKRI we introduced our new open access books policy earlier this year, and via this new collaboration with OAPEN we can be more confident about the discovery, access, and use of the research results from UKRI funded research. We look forward to working together, and with other OAPEN partners, to support open and transparent research.”

For more information on our funded collections, please visit our website. For more information about making your UKRI-funded book open access, please visit the UKRI website.

About UKRI: UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is the largest public funder of research and innovation in the UK, investing £8 billion annually spanning all disciplines and all sectors. We are nine councils, drawing on our unique breadth and depth of expertise to work with government and other stakeholders to enrich lives, by increasing our understanding of ourselves and the world around us, supporting innovative businesses and public services, and creating high-quality jobs throughout the UK.

About OAPEN: The OAPEN Foundation is an independent, not-for-profit organisation dedicated to peer-reviewed open access books. OAPEN promotes and supports the global transition to open access for academic books by providing open infrastructure services to stakeholders in scholarly communication. OAPEN operates three platforms: the OAPEN Library, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB, in partnership with OpenEdition), and the OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit.