Our communities
At OBP we collaborate with like-minded organisations to develop open infrastructure for the publication of open access works, to share our books via open platforms and services, and to promote our vision and values across the world.
Infrastructure and Training Partnerships
Copim: Open Book Futures project
Copim is a community that is building and advocating for community-controlled, open systems and infrastructures to develop and strengthen open access book publishing. Copim is currently involved in the Open Book Futures project, funded by the Research England Development (RED) Fund and Arcadia Fund, in which we have a key role. Read more about this project and our involvement.
Open Access Books Network (OABN)
We are one of three coordinators, alongside OAPEN/DOAB and SPARC Europe, of the Open Access Books Network (OABN), a free and open network that enables a community of people to share knowledge, best practices, support and advice on all issues related to OA books via events, blog posts, resources and more. Join the OABN Mailing List or find us at Humanities Commons.
Open Book Collective
We are a member of the Open Book Collective, a community and platform developed by Copim to enable presses and infrastructures to seek funding from libraries, and to make it easier for libraries to support mission-driven open access initiatives. Libraries can support us via the Open Book Collective or via our own Library Membership Programme. Find out more about the Open Book Collective.
Thoth
Thoth is an open metadata management and dissemination system developed as part of Copim, supporting a growing community of publishers to share their open access books as widely as possible.. Thoth now powers our metadata management and the dissemination of our books -- as well as the catalogue on this website! Find out more about Thoth.
ScholarLed
OPB is a founder member of ScholarLed, a consortium of non-profit, academic-led and Open Access publishers that are collectively developing powerful, practical ways for small-scale, academic-led Open Access presses to grow and flourish in a publishing landscape that is changing rapidly. OBP is excited to be part of a group that embodies the spirit of open access, sharing our knowledge, resources and expertise across the consortium to help achieve our ultimate goal: to enable as many readers as possible to access high-quality research, free of charge.
Open Institutional Publishing Association
We are very proud to be an associate member of the Open Institutional Publishing Association (OIPA), which formally launched in Autumn 2023. This group is a community of practice for publishing operations affiliated with institutions which are striving for open access, from small and medium-sized university presses to individuals based within university libraries working on scholarly journals. The association offers a new infrastructure to support non-commercial open access publishing within the UK, creating a forum to share advice, information, resources, training and best practice. To find out more or get involved, please visit the OIPA website or contact OIPA.
PALOMERA
We are a partner in the PALOMERA (Policy Alignment of Open Access Monographs in the European Research Area) project, which is funded by Horizon Europe and will provide actionable recommendations and concrete resources to support and coordinate aligned funder and institutional policies for OA books, with the overall objective of speeding up the transition to open access for books to further promote open science. Read more about our involvement in PALOMERA.
DiXiT
We are an Associate Partner of the Digital Scholarly Editions Initial Training Network. We provide secondments to early stage researchers in order to facilitate their research and involve them in a variety of digitization projects.
EU Framework Programme
OBP, along with five other publishers partnered together as part of an EU project, HIRMEOS. This project developed a number of new services for Open Access monographs across existing platforms, specifically we created database architecture and protocols and usage data collection and aggregation tools. This undertaking marked the early steps in an exciting and ongoing new direction for us, to systematically develop and release our existing publishing software as managed Open Source content, and so enable easy adoption by other and new OA publishing initiatives.
Open Platform Partnerships
The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
All of our titles are listed in the Directory of Open Access Books. DOAB provides a searchable index to peer-reviewed monographs and edited volumes published under an Open Access business model, with links to the full texts of the publications at the publisher’s website or repository.
College Open Textbooks (COT) Education
College Open Textbooks, a US non-profit organisation with the most extensive listing of open textbooks on the web (over 700 titles), is in the process of uploading all our titles onto their site.
OpenEdition Books
Our publications are hosted on the OpenEdition Books platform. OpenEdition is a web portal for electronic resources in the humanities and social sciences hosting Open Access publications from a consortium of over 160 publishers.
Open Textbooks
OBP is a strong advocate of the Open Textbook movement. Our titles are widely available on numerous Open Textbook platforms such as MERLOT, the Open Textbook Library, OER Commons and BCcampus OpenEd Resources.
Unglue.it
We have collaborated with unglue.it to produce several books such as Oral Literature in Africa, Feeding the City, The Classic Short Story, 1870-1925 and The Jewish Unions in America: Pages of History and Memories. Unglue.it is a service provided by The Free Ebook Foundation. It is a place for individuals and institutions to join together to liberate specific ebooks and other types of digital content by paying authors and publishers to relicense their works under Creative Commons licenses.
Accessibility Partnerships
Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB)
We have made all of our books available on the RNIB Bookshare platform, which provides education resources for print-disabled learners, including those with dyslexia or who are blind or partially sighted. We have supplied our titles in PDF and EPUB (over 92% of our books are available in EPUB). Using the EPUB format, the RNIB can make the book available in all accessible download formats, including Braille-ready and DAISY, while the PDFs are available as an accessible PDF.
Library Access Partnerships
Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL)
OBP works with EIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries) to provide three years' free membership of the OBP Library Membership Programme to libraries that are members of library consortia in EIFL partner countries, including Botswana, Kosovo and many more. Through our partnership with EIFL, over 1000 libraries in middle and low-income countries provide all staff, students and alumni with every digital edition of all our titles free of charge, with a discount on any paper copies purchased.
Open Access Organization Memberships
Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA)
We are members of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), whose mission is to represent the interests of Open Access journal and book publishers globally in all scientific, technical and scholarly disciplines. This mission will be carried out through exchanging information, setting standards, advancing models, advocacy, education, and the promotion of innovation. View our Membership page.
Radical Open Access Alliance (ROAC)
Formed in 2015 the Radical Open Access Collective is a community of scholar-led, not-for-profit presses, journals and other open access projects. The collective promotes a progressive vision for open publishing in the humanities and social sciences and share an understanding of open access as being characterised by a spirit of ongoing creative experimentation.
International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP)
We are part of INASP's network of Open Access organisations. INASP works with partners like us to support global research communication through innovation, focusing particularly on the needs of developing and emerging countries.
Pure Open Access Alliance
OBP is a founding member of the Pure Open Access Alliance. Created in 2013 the Alliance represents the major publishers which release all their list in OA format, and works to promote OA policies and best practices.