A couple of days ago Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) was launched. It is a complement to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) web site. DOAB is a service to the research community, and others, to collect scientific books published under open access license and make the accessible in one and the same place. DOAB is searchable and there are links to the fulltext books either via the publisher or a institutional repository where a researcher has deposited the book.
The aim of DOAB is to make open access books visible and create a valuable resource for researchers, libraries and others who are interested in reading scientific books. At the moment there are about 20 publishers and about 750 open access books available. More are waiting to be made available through the site. Their goal is to increase the number of available books in the coming months. DOAB is open for publishers who publish peer-reviewed open access books.
Lars Bjørnshauge and Salam Baker Shanawa who have been developing DOAB have also been in the group which developed DOAJ.
First published in Biblioteksbloggen 2012-04-19
By: Pieta Eklund