Press release - October 11, 2010

Successful launch of the OAPEN Library at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2010

On October 6, the OAPEN Library (http://www.oapen.org) was successfully launched at the Frankfurt Book Fair. This marks the start of the first dedicated collection of freely available academic books in the Humanities and Social Sciences from across Europe.

The goals of the OAPEN Library are:

1. to promote Open Access book publishing by building a branded collection of OA peer-reviewed titles

2. to increase the visibility and retrievability of high-quality European research

3. to set quality standards for OA books, based on transparent procedures for peer review and recommendations for OA licences.

Several speakers introduced the OAPEN Library to an interested audience, starting with Sven Fund (CEO of De Gruyter) who discussed "Open Access for books and how to accomplish it". Arnoud de Kemp (Publisher, Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft AKA and organiser of the yearly APE conference - Academic Publishing in Europe) spoke on the subject of "Open Access as part of
Digital Publishing" and Henk Wals (director of the Huygens Institute - KNAW) revealed in his talk "Open Access in a research institution" the inclusion of the first titles of the prestigious Erasmus, Opera Omnia series into the OAPEN Library. The official launch was executed by Henk Wals,
by starting this animation: http://youtu.be/GnYhialJ648.

More information on OAPEN and the Library is available for you at www.oapen.org (OAPEN Library) or http://www.oapen.org/project (background information).

The official launch of the OAPEN Library also serves as an invitation to interested publishers to benefit through the integration of their content in the library or to become members of our Partner network and profit from the growing visibility of OAPEN and the experiences of participating publishers.

For more information, contact Eelco Ferwerda (Coordinator of OAPEN, Amsterdam University Press) tel. 0031 (0)20 420 0050, email e.ferwerda@aup.nl