Ramazan Turgut is a publishing specialist and academic working at the intersection of open science, scholarly communication, and digital research infrastructure. He currently serves as Managing Editor at the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), where he supports the transition of journals to open access and promotes best practices in metadata, publication ethics, and editorial workflows.
What motivated you to join DOAB as an ambassador?
I have spent most of my career helping journals and books from Turkey become visible in international indexes, often starting from national infrastructures such as DergiPark for journals and local university presses for books, and I’ve seen first-hand how transformative that visibility can be for researchers, institutions, and local communities. DOAB plays a unique role in giving open access books a global reach while respecting bibliodiversity and local publishing traditions. For the Turkish open access community, DOAB feels like a natural complement to existing journal infrastructures, because it offers books the same kind of global visibility that many journals already enjoy through platforms like DergiPark. Becoming an ambassador felt like a very natural step: it allows me to bring together my work in DOAJ, my experience with metadata and infrastructure, my long-standing professional commitment to open, equitable access to knowledge and personal passion for books.
How do you plan to drive open access books publishing in your country/region through your work as a DOAB ambassador?
My first priority is to listen to publishers, editors, and librarians in Turkey and understand how to establish a bidirectional and mutually beneficial relationship with DOAB, to drive forward open access books publishing together. Many are interested in open access monographs, but may feel unsure about technical workflows, metadata, or quality criteria. I want to demystify the process: offering webinars and hands-on support in Turkish, helping publishers prepare high-quality metadata, and connecting them with the wider DOAB and OAPEN community. In parallel, I hope to build stronger bridges between institutional presses, university libraries, and global infrastructures such as DOAB, DOAJ, Crossref, and OpenAIRE, so that open access books from Turkey are properly indexed, trusted, and easily discoverable worldwide.
What or who inspires you in your role?
I am constantly inspired by small university presses, librarians, and editors who are committed to open access even when they work with very limited resources. In Turkey, I’ve seen teams build impressive journal and book programmes with almost no dedicated infrastructure, just a strong belief that knowledge should be shared. I’m also inspired by scholars who publish in languages like Turkish, Kurdish or Arabic and still want their work to be part of global conversations. Their efforts to balance local relevance with international visibility motivate me to work on better metadata, multilingual discovery, and more inclusive infrastructures.
What are the biggest challenges you see in advancing open access book publishing in your country/region?
One major challenge in Turkey is the lack of sustainable funding and policy frameworks for open access monographs. Many institutions support open access in principle, but concrete policies, budgets, and workflows for books are only just emerging. In Turkey, most open access journals benefit from the shared national platform DergiPark, but there is not yet a comparable common infrastructure for open access books. I know that TÜBİTAK ULAKBİM is exploring the idea of such a platform. If this materialises, it could be a real game-changer, especially for open access books produced by university presses. A national book platform, if realised, could fill this gap and make it much easier for university presses to publish open access books sustainably, especially in Turkish.
There is also some uncertainty and misunderstanding around quality: authors sometimes worry that publishing an open access book might be seen as “less serious” or “less prestigious”, which is, of course not true. Finally, technical capacity can be a barrier; things like persistent identifiers, XML or high-quality multilingual metadata can feel overwhelming. Part of my role as ambassador is to show that these challenges are solvable, and that infrastructures like DOAB exist precisely to support publishers on this journey.
Anything else you would like to add?
Beyond my ambassador role, I’m involved in a collaborative initiative called “Language Agnostic Knowledge”, which explores how AI and semantic technologies can make non-English research more visible in global infrastructures. For me, this is closely connected to the mission of DOAB: open access only becomes truly meaningful when books are not just free to read, but also easy to find, regardless of the language they are written in. I’m excited to contribute to a future where open access books from Turkey and the wider region are fully part of the international research conversation, on their own terms and in their own languages.