Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by Jordy Findanis and Niels Stern. Jordy is Project Manager at OAPEN and the Directory of Open Access Books and also works on the Copim Open Book Futures Project. Niesl is Managing Director of the OAPEN Foundation and has worked in scholarly publishing for more than 20 years. Part 2 of the post is now available.
While awareness of predatory journals is growing, the risks posed by untrustworthy book publishers remain less well known. Some open access (OA) book publishers charge authors a Book Processing Charge (BPC), which — when handled by a reputable publisher — covers vital services such as peer review, editorial oversight, and wide dissemination.
Predatory book publishers, however, often charge similar fees without providing these essential services. They may even mimic the names of legitimate publishers, making them difficult to identify. For authors — especially early-career researchers — distinguishing between credible and untrustworthy organizations can be challenging. Falling into the trap of a predatory publisher can mean losing money, seeing their work unpublished or poorly presented, and suffering damage to their academic reputation.
That’s why Think. Check. Submit. offers guidance to help researchers identify trusted publishers. This international initiative provides practical tools and resources to promote research integrity and ensure work is shared through reputable channels. The Think. Check. Submit. checklist for books and chapters walks authors through key questions to evaluate a publisher’s credibility. It’s available in 25 languages to support researchers worldwide.
The checklist advises researchers to verify whether a publisher is indexed by a reputable service before submitting their work. Indexing services apply strict inclusion criteria and serve as valuable tools for librarians and researchers evaluating the credibility of publishing outlets. Some well-known organizations that conduct quality checks before accepting content include, amongst others, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), Latindex, Redalyc-AmeliCA, and SciELO. The exponential growth of the DOAB in recent years reflects how OA peer-reviewed scholarly books continue to gain global momentum, and questions of quality assurance, transparency, and trust have become increasingly central — not only for librarians and researchers, but also for publishers, funders, researchers, service providers, and scholarly aggregation platforms. To reflect on this fast-evolving landscape, it seems pertinent to delve into how DOAB, as an open and key infrastructure for the relevant stakeholders in OA book publishing, addresses these questions. This blog post, therefore, explores how DOAB navigates core areas in the domain, from establishing and updating criteria for publisher inclusion to addressing scalability challenges, advocating for best practices in peer review, and countering questionable publishing behaviors (full disclosure, both authors of this post are employees of OAPEN). It also reflects on DOAB’s collaborative work within the broader scholarly ecosystem — including through networks and participation in community consultations — to foster a more inclusive, diverse, and accountable environment that supports quality long-form OA scholarly publishing.
DOAB: Some Background
The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) is an open aggregation index currently listing peer-reviewed scholarly OA books by more than 750 book publishers, encompassing over 94,000 titles across more than 80 languages. Along with promoting the dissemination of academic knowledge, DOAB’s core mission is to foster trust in OA academic book publishing through transparency.
Launched by the OAPEN Foundation in 2013, DOAB has developed into a widely used global infrastructure for the discoverability of OA books. In 2019, it became an independent non-profit foundation based in the Netherlands, jointly managed by OAPEN and OpenEdition. DOAB is governed by an Executive Board, a Supervisory Board, and a Scientific Committee, ensuring accountability and active community engagement. DOAB’s financing model relies on support from libraries and publisher sponsorships, underscoring its status as a community-driven initiative. Through its commitment to openness and transparency as core values guiding our operations, DOAB continues to adhere to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI).
DOAB’s criteria
Since its inception, DOAB has required that books submitted by publishers must adhere to a few but important and explicitly stated criteria before they can be included in the directory: each book must carry an open license and must have undergone an independent, external peer review. Additionally, it has to be in scope of a prescribed definition of a long-form academic work, i.e., a monograph, edited collection, or book chapter. Peer review remains a central pillar of these requirements, and the DOAB website outlines specific criteria relating to the publisher’s quality control process:
- The editorial process must be stated clearly on the website.
The name and affiliation of the editor(s) and board members (if applicable) must be listed on the website.
- All submitted books must be peer reviewed before publication.
The type and details of the peer review process must be stated clearly on the website.
The reviewing process must be independent and external, appropriate for the subject, and done by experts in the field who are not part of the publisher’s editorial staff.
Additionally, the recommendation that publishers provide a “policy describing the handling of potential conflict of interest of editors, authors and reviewers” is also included.
While this dimension is of paramount importance, there is a swath of other aspects of a publisher’s operations that intersect with and underpin quality control.
This is why DOAB has developed a range of criteria and recommendations that are designed to support the internal review procedure: These include assessing the publisher’s website (e.g., looking for contact details, and to what extent web standards and best ethical practices have been applied to the website’s content, presentation, and application), their catalogue (e.g., checking if books are accessible without registration), licensing information, author instructions or guidelines etc. (full list of DOAB criteria and recommendations). Given the increasing volume and diversity of publisher applications — representing a wide array of disciplines, languages, and publishing models — the DOAB evaluation process has been adapted to include both core requirements, as well as this broader array of tangential recommendations in a holistic review of the applying publisher.
Balancing growth with scalability
Over the past 10-15 years, we have witnessed a significant acceleration and proliferation of OA book publishing, particularly in Europe, North America and Latin America, presenting challenges around scalability and quality assurance. This trend is likely to continue as more traction of long-form OA outputs in regions like Asia and Africa can be anticipated. But with this growth comes the need to exercise due diligence, attending to scalability challenges. Inspired by the Directory of Open Access Journals, DOAB set up a dedicated evaluation team to review applications. Given the disproportionately small size of its evaluation team relative to the collection’s scale, DOAB’s review process is tailored to the unique characteristics of academic book publishing. First, it is neither scalable nor sustainable for a platform like DOAB to evaluate on an individual book level as this would require an inordinate amount of effort and a set-up specially endowed to deal with that. Books can vary significantly in terms of length, for instance within the humanities, which constitutes a large corpus within the collection. Thus, DOAB evaluates publishers at the organizational level — a model that allows for scalable, consistent, and sustainable assessment while maintaining rigorous academic standards.
Advocacy and best practices
DOAB serves a wide range of global stakeholders — including publishers, libraries, funders, researchers, and service providers — who depend on the assurance of academic quality of the scholarship we disseminate. We do not take this responsibility lightly, advocating for the importance of peer review in our daily operations and via presentations, conferences, workshops, webinars, blogs and articles.
A key resource promoting high-quality scholarship is OAPEN’s Open Access Books Toolkit, a stakeholder-agnostic resource dedicated to providing information and best practices for all aspects of book publishing, including a dedicated section on peer review. Complementing this is PRISM — Peer Review Information Service for Monographs (part of the OPERAS service catalog), which is a standardized method for academic publishers to present information about their peer review processes across their entire catalog in DOAB. At the publisher level, it shows all peer review procedures in use (since multiple practices may be employed across different series and titles). The aim of PRISM is to promote transparency around peer review practices, helping to foster trust in OA academic book publishing. It also reflects the understanding that peer review is neither a static nor monolithic entity, but comes in many forms and flavors, mirroring the heterogeneity of global scholarship.
One of the central objectives of PALOMERA (Policy Alignment of Open access Monographs in the European Research Area), a recently completed two-year project funded by the EU, was to examine the current policy OA landscape and identify barriers faced by research funders and institutions and to provide evidence-based, coordinated policy recommendations tailored to eight key stakeholder groups. An ancillary aim was to strengthen the inclusion of scholarly, peer-reviewed books in OA policies and have the stakeholder groups actively promote quality control and assurance of long-form OA publications, ensuring their credibility and value within scholarly communication.
In addition to enhancing review practices and book publishing in general, DOAB is strongly committed to countering questionable book publishing practices by raising awareness about sustained threats represented by predatory publishing activities that pose a threat to scholarly integrity and risk undermining a healthy and robust scholarly ecosystem.
