Aggressive content-harvesting bots and automated systems are generating increased traffic to open infrastructure platforms and library repositories, creating a community-wide challenge. This activity places significant strain on open platforms, affecting normal operations and services that users depend on.
Concerns about the long-term impact of bot scraping were highlighted at a 2025 Charleston Conference panel, ‘Bot war: Will evil AI-scraping bots succeed in destroying our open digital libraries?’, which raised questions about the future sustainability of open platforms.
Despite these issues, we remain and persist in our effort to provide our normal services as we always have. Therefore, we want to provide an update on the intermittent access issues that some users may experience when visiting the OAPEN Library and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB).
Understanding the challenge
Our platforms are currently under a sustained, high-volume struggle from automated traffic. This traffic consists primarily of aggressive content harvesting bots and automated systems scanning for vulnerabilities. If left unmitigated, this activity would overwhelm our infrastructure, cause outages, and ultimately deny access to the global scholarly community we exist to serve.
Our response: protecting legitimate access
To safeguard stable and reliable access for researchers, students, librarians, publishers, and the general public, we have implemented proactive security controls. The primary measure is rate limiting coupled with temporary IP restrictions.
When our systems detect an IP address making an exceptionally high number of requests in a short period, characteristic of automated scraping, access from that address is temporarily restricted. Affected users will see the following message:
“Access Temporarily Restricted: We have detected an unusually high volume of requests from your network. To protect the stability of our service for all users, access has been temporarily limited for 24 hours. If you are a legitimate user and believe this is an error, please contact our support team.”
Additionally, we will whitelist IP ranges for the libraries supporting us, so that users accessing OAPEN or DOAB from the library networks get better access to our services.
This targeted approach allows us to limit disruptive traffic while providing a clear, straightforward path for genuine users to regain access.
How you can help ensure uninterrupted access
OAPEN and DOAB are free and open to everyone, and registration or login is not required for access. However, anyone can create an account (not only publishers and other professionals), and being logged in can help reduce the chance that your IP address is temporarily restricted by our automated protection measures. Authenticated sessions are trusted and are far less likely to be flagged by our systems.
If your access is restricted:
- Wait for the temporary block to expire. The standard restriction period is 24 hours.
- Log in to your account (see instructions below). Login is not a prerequisite to access the OAPEN Library and DOAB, but a helpful measure to avoid blocks.
- Contact our support team. If the issue persists and affects your work, please reach out to us at [email protected].
Providing your IP address can help us investigate.
To login to the OAPEN Library, click the ‘Join’ button in the top-right corner of the window and proceed to login if you already have an account or register as a new user.
To login to DOAB, click the ‘Publisher login’ in the navigation bar at the top of the window and proceed to login if you already have an account or register as a new user.
Why these measures are essential
OAPEN and DOAB are non-profit, community-serving infrastructures. Our mission is to guarantee open, equitable, and resilient access to scholarly books. Permitting uncontrolled automated exploitation as performed by these AI bots directly contradicts this mission, threatening the service for everyone. The protections we have in place are not merely technical safeguards; they are a necessary commitment to our community’s ability to rely on us.
Together with our server hosting partner, CERN, we are continuously monitoring the situation and refining our systems to improve their accuracy and minimise any impact on real users. This work remains a top operational priority.
We thank you for your patience and continued support.
The OAPEN & DOAB Team