A global group from academia and scholarly communications have prepared a book publishing guide to Open Access.

The Directory of Open Access Books lists more than 32,000 titles from over 400 publishers. Topics range from Epidemics and the Health of African Nations to Close Reading with Computers: Textual Scholarship, Computational Formalism, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.

Scholars who want to see their work added to this free and accessible library now have a toolkit with answers on funding, identifying publishing options, and even contractual terms in a book contract.

A global group of stakeholders from academia and scholarly communications prepared the toolkit in collaboration with Springer Nature and The University of Glasgow. It is hosted by OAPEN, which also manages the Directory of Open Access Books.

“There is quite some evidence that there is a bit of a skeptical attitude on Open Access among book authors. The idea was the misconceptions and lack of awareness should be answered,” says Eelco Ferwerda, Director for the DOAB Foundation & OAPEN Foundation. “We were really excited to take part and to develop the toolkit with Springer Nature and many other representatives from publishers, from libraries, from funders.”