Authors: Ronald Snijder
Reviewers: Françoise Gouzi, Sy Holsinger

As you may know, the OAPEN Foundation manages two platforms to distribute open access books and chapters: the OAPEN Library and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB). Both platforms have thrived for over a decade, experiencing substantial growth in their respective collections. As of November 2023, the collection of the OAPEN Library contains over 30,000 full text books and chapters, while the collection of titles listed in DOAB has passed the 75,000 mark. This amount of titles allows us to do interesting things, but it also means we have to put more work into maintaining our collections. 

At the OAPEN Foundation, we work on new possibilities, based on the needs of our users. Those users are the readers of our open access books, as well as the publishers and the libraries that strive to make open access books a success.

Recommending books for readers

For instance, having access to tens of thousands of open access books makes it possible to create recommendations, without sacrificing the privacy of our readers. Web retailers such as Amazon.com are able to find just the right book for you. This is a great feature, but it comes at a cost: its recommendations work because it is storing information about you. The better it knows you, the better its recommendations.

At OAPEN, we do not track people. We are currently working on a recommender system that is not prying on your privacy, but uses the full text of the titles in our collection. So, instead of collecting user data, we took the complete text of our titles, cut it up in blocks of three consecutive words (called trigrams) and filtered out all the common phrases. This procedure leaves you with a small group of terms that are unique for that particular book. The next phase is finding other titles that share the same terms. The more terms they share, the more they are connected. In this way, it is easier to find books that are quite similar. However, the recommender system can also find books that are a little less similar: to expand your research or to create a collection of books. Surprisingly enough, this algorithm even works across languages.

You can read more here: https://doi.org/10.53377/lq.10938. 

OA books “à la carte” – special collections for libraries

Another thing we are working on is the Metadata Export Module for Open access books, or MEMO for short. This service is more optimised for libraries and other parties that use some or all books in the OAPEN Library. It allows us to create smaller sets of books, based on specific needs.

For instance, we work with EBSCO to provide the description of our books to be included in their GOBI system. GOBI is used as a tool by academic libraries to buy e-books. To enable this, we have to send the metadata of all our books in a very specific XML format, which is only used by this system. 

Another example is the SCELC Pilot Project. The Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium has asked us to provide 10 different sets of book descriptions. Each set contains not all of the books in OAPEN, but a selection based on certain subjects and/or certain languages. The metadata for these ‘subcollections’ must be in both the MARCXML and the KBART format. 

As we see more and more of these kinds of requests, we are currently building a tool that will allow us to make any type of selection in the OAPEN collection, export it to whatever type of metadata needed, and make that available on a website. The metadata sets will be automatically updated.

Double checking the DOAB metadata – supporting publishers

The main purpose of DOAB is to make sure that open access books can be found on the websites of many publishers and on several open access books platforms. Therefore, it is very important that all links work and continue to keep working. And when the number of links is this high, it cannot be done manually.

That is why we also innovate on the maintenance of our collections. In early November, the Free Ebook Foundation and the OAPEN Foundation unveiled a new website that is checking all of the links in the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB). The website, open to for all to access at https://doab-check.ebookfoundation.org, checks each of the over 68,000 links in DOAB approximately once a month. The DOAB-Check website presents lists of the checked links, organised by publisher, by the web host and by the type of problem observed for the most recent check. The entire set of recent checks is available as a bulk download and an API provides programmatic access to link status for any DOAB identifier. As of the beginning of November, the links were being checked, with 6% of them having issues of some sort.