STICHTING OAPEN*OPEN ACCESS PUBLISHING IN EUROPEAN NETWORKS

Their core work

OAPEN is a Netherlands-based foundation that operates open access infrastructure for academic books, monographs, and long-form scholarly texts. They run a platform where researchers can deposit and discover open access publications, with a particular focus on social sciences and humanities (SSH). Their core mission is making European scholarly monographs freely accessible — they handle the technical infrastructure, metadata standards, and policy compliance that underpin open access book publishing across Europe.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

In the early period (2015–2017), OAPEN focused on building foundational open science infrastructure and establishing scholarly communication standards for SSH disciplines, as seen in OPERAS-D and the first ERC support grant. From 2019 onward, their work shifted toward practical integration — deposit systems for books and monographs, multilingual discovery platforms, OA compliance requirements, and connecting their infrastructure to EOSC. The trend is clear: from advocacy and design to operational infrastructure that enforces and enables open access mandates.

OAPEN is moving from building open access awareness toward becoming essential compliance infrastructure for OA book mandates, making them increasingly relevant as funders tighten OA requirements.

How they like to work

OAPEN balances leadership and partnership almost evenly — coordinating 3 projects (all ERC-OAPEN support grants) while participating in 4 larger collaborative efforts. Their 36 unique partners across 18 countries suggest they operate as a well-connected hub in the European open access ecosystem rather than sticking to a small circle. They fit naturally into medium-to-large SSH infrastructure consortia where their platform serves as a shared resource.

OAPEN has collaborated with 36 partners across 18 countries, giving them a genuinely pan-European network centered on scholarly publishing and SSH research infrastructure. Their partnerships span universities, publishers, libraries, and other open science organizations across the continent.

What sets them apart

OAPEN occupies a rare niche: they are one of the few organizations in Europe dedicated specifically to open access infrastructure for books and monographs, not journals. While most OA infrastructure serves STEM journal articles, OAPEN focuses on long-form texts in social sciences and humanities — a gap that few others fill. For any consortium needing OA book deposit, SSH discoverability, or monograph compliance infrastructure, OAPEN is effectively the default European partner.

Highlights from their portfolio

• HIRMEOS
  Largest single grant (EUR 359,938) focused on integrating research monographs into European Open Science infrastructure — their most ambitious technical project.
• TRIPLE
  Most recent and forward-looking project, connecting SSH resources to EOSC with multilingual discovery capabilities across disciplines.
• OPERAS-P
  Second-largest funding (EUR 254,110), preparing the operational framework for open access scholarly communication across European research areas.