New Horizon 2020 project to enhance open access book publishing

Kyle Brady
Wednesday 22 February 2017

A new EU Horizon 2020 project has been announced, entitled High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science infrastructure, or HIRMEOS for short. We’ve written on this blog numerous times about open access books, see previous posts here and here, and from what is known about this project it certainly could be a very important next step in advancing open access long-form publishing in the Humanities and Social sciences.

The participants in this project are:

The HIRMIOS project partners have been charged with the task of enhancing the technical standards and interoperability of five open access monograph publishing platforms, and embedding these enhanced systems in the European Open Science Cloud*. The open access publishers included in the project are Ubiquity Press, OpenEdition Books, OAPEN Library, Göttingen University Press and EKT Open Book Press. According to the Project blurb, these publishers will be enhanced in the following ways:

“[They will be provided with] tools that enable identification, authentication and interoperability (DOI, ORCID, Fundref), and tools that enrich information and entity extraction (INRIA (N)ERD), the ability to annotate monographs (Hypothes.is), and gather usage and alternative metric data.” (http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/206340_en.html)

The project will also assist the automatic ingesting of content into Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), and will create better indexing capabilities, as well as a certification system to better document information about peer-review. Currently DOAB offers open access to almost 6000 peer-reviewed academic books. 

Certainly this sounds like a very interesting project and it is encouraging to see a large investment in new models for open access in the Humanities and Social Sciences It is also particularly encouraging to see multiple publishers working together to create open source tools that can enable other burgeoning publishers to improve their systems. 
The project website is here: http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/206340_en.html

*The first report detailing recommendations for the European Open Science Cloud can be downloaded here: http://ec.europa.eu/research/openscience/pdf/realising_the_european_open_science_cloud_2016.pdf.

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