As we approach the holiday season, we look back on some of the highlights of a tumultuous year and would like to share these with you.

SCOSS Campaign

In 2020 we started with our sustainable funding campaign supported by SCOSS, seeking financial support from the open science community. We are grateful for the widespread support received from 44 institutions thus far and are excited to continue with the campaign in 2021. A recording of one of the several SCOSS presentations held this year can be found here.

OAPEN OA Books Toolkit

In September 2020, OAPEN launched the OAPEN OA Books Toolkit: A new resource created by a global group of stakeholders from the academic community and scholarly communications organisations. The toolkit aims to help authors to better understand and increase trust in open access (OA) book publishing. A video recording introducing the toolkit can be found here.

Growth in usage (COUNTER) & publications

OAPEN is pleased to share that usage of the OAPEN Library has doubled for the reporting period May 2020 - October 2020, compared to the same period in 2019. In 2020, we served over 2.6 million downloads, whereas the same period in 2019 saw 1.3 million downloads. At the same time as the collection grew by a factor of 1.5 from 9,000 to 13,500 titles, this means the average downloads per book has increased significantly, more here. We would like to thank and welcome the numerous publishers new to the OAPEN Library since this year.
 

Cooperation with European Research Council 

This last quarter, also marked the started a new project for the European Research Council. The overall objective of the project is to support open access to long-text publications stemming from ERC funded research, and thereby to increase the visibility of the underlying ERC funded research, in a sustainable way. A specific task in the project is to explore a new business model for the Deposit service, in collaboration with research funders that are already partners of the service, and in the context of Plan S
 

The OAPEN team thanks you all for your support in 2020 and wishes you good health. We look forward to continuing to collaborate with the OA and OS community in 2021.

Dorien, Eelco, Lotte, Niels, Ronald & Tom

For more information, please contact Tom Mosterd, community manager at the OAPEN Foundation t.mosterd@oapen.org