The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) and academic publisher Brill has announced that the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), from the Netherlands, has been selected as this year's winner of the IFLA/Brill Open Access Award.
The IFLA/Brill Open Access Award was created in 2013 for initiatives in the area of open access monograph publishing. This year the jury has chosen Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) (the Netherlands) as the most outstanding and game-changing initiative in the field. Earlier winners were Open Book Publishers (2013) and Knowledge Unlatched (2014).
DOAB, the Directory of Open Access Books, is the discovery service for open access books. DOAB provides a searchable index to peer-reviewed books published under an OA business model, with links to the full text at the publisher's website. DOAB is a service of OAPEN Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to Open Access monographs. DOAB has grown steadily since its launch in 2012. April 2015, the directory reached a milestone with 100 OA publishers listed and over 2800 books included. Research has shown that OA books listed in DOAB receive almost twice as many downloads as unlisted books.
The jury of the IFLA/Brill award recognises that in the few years of its existence DOAB has already proven its invaluable worth by becoming the central hub of the global infrastructure for open access book publishing. DOAB also works to enhance the quality of OA book publishing by requiring transparent independent peer-review procedures from participating publishers. In short, DOAB provides the scholarly community with a trusted channel to a vast and growing amount of open access material. DOAB has received wide recognition from the library world.
