The OAPEN Foundation (OAPEN) and OpenAIRE have announced a partnership to deliver COUNTER‑conformant usage data for the OAPEN Library through OpenAIRE PROVIDE, while strengthening interoperability between open scholarly communication infrastructures.
Through this collaboration, usage data for Open Access (OA) books in the OAPEN Library and metadata records in the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) will be aggregated and delivered by OpenAIRE, feeding into the OAPEN Library Dashboard. This service provides publishers, libraries, and funders with insights into the reach and use of OA books and metadata, supporting monitoring and evaluation of OA publishing. OpenAIRE PROVIDE will enable stakeholders to continue accessing these insights via personalized dashboards, while OAPEN promotes the importance of high‑quality open scholarly research.
The partnership ensures continuity for the Dashboard following the retirement of the IRUS‑UK service in April 2026. The OAPEN Library currently hosts more than 40,000 OA books from over 500 publishers, with usage data serving as a key resource for publishers, libraries, and funders pursuing Open Science goals.
Beyond usage statistics, the collaboration aims to improve visibility and discoverability of OA books within the broader Open Science ecosystem. Plans include enhancing metadata exchange and interoperability between OAPEN and OpenAIRE, such as integrating OAPEN metadata and usage information into services powered by the OpenAIRE Graph. This will support stronger connections between books and book chapters with research projects, funders, institutions, and other outputs through persistent identifiers and enriched metadata.
The collaboration reflects a shared commitment to community‑driven infrastructures that support discoverability, accessibility, and monitoring of scholarly books. OAPEN emphasized that open access depends on robust, interoperable, and community‑governed infrastructures, noting that working with OpenAIRE ensures continuity and quality in usage reporting while embedding OA books more deeply into the Open Science ecosystem.
OpenAIRE highlighted that books remain central to scholarly communication but are often treated as isolated records in research information systems. The OpenAIRE Graph, by contrast, connects books and chapters with people, organizations, projects, funders, datasets, and publications. The partnership with OAPEN was described as an opportunity to integrate OA books more fully into this open knowledge graph, improving their discoverability, monitoring, and reuse within the wider research landscape.
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