COVID19: Information and Resources from OBP

COVID19 Mar 25, 2020

The coronavirus pandemic is challenging us all. At Open Book Publishers, we are continuing with our work—albeit from our separate homes, rather than our office in central Cambridge—publishing academic books that are freely available online to read, download and share.

Readers: please continue to enjoy and share our books. They are are available online with no paywall—you can read, download and reuse them in PDF, HTML and XML formats without charge, as always and for always.

Authors: please continue to submit your proposals to us, if you have them.

We are also still taking orders for our paperback, hardback, EPUB and MOBI editions, if you prefer a physical copy or another digital format, or if you would like to support our work with a purchase. (You can also support us with a donation if you wish.)

We wish safety and good health to our readers, our authors, and to everyone who is caught up in the current situation.

COVID19 and Open Access

During this period of crisis, the need for Open Access resources has become obvious to all. Most evidently, people need access to medical information, and those attempting to treat the virus and halt its spread need access to the relevant research (both the most recent work and the long tail on all relevant topics).

As well as this, people need easy and free access to high-quality content in a range of subject areas: to educate their children at home, to fill their time meaningfully and pleasurably in isolation, to continue with research projects, to take their minds off the whirl of news, to help them learn or write or think or plan.

The open availability of high-quality academic work—open to read, to share, to reuse and to build on in perpetuity, not simply free to read for a limited time at a publisher's discretion—is necessary at all times. This need is particularly obvious now.

So we will continue, as best as we can and with as much care as we can, to do our work: to publish brilliantly written, beautifully formatted books that are completely free to access online, to share and to reuse. We hope that they will do some good during this difficult and challenging period—and beyond it.

Curated resources: disease control, remote conferencing and more

Here we offer links to a number of posts that we hope will be particularly useful at this time. This list will be updated with new posts as they are written.

We have also collated a list of high-quality Open Access resources (mostly academic books and textbooks, but also some tools and platforms to help you find OA journal content). These resources are free to read, without a login or a paywall, now and in the future.

Open books, open research

In this list you'll find platforms and repositories that host Open Access content or help you to discover Open Access content (primarily books, because that's what we know most about).

Note: this isn't content that has had its paywall temporarily lifted—this content is freely available to use and reuse always. It's Open Access.

Lucy Barnes

Lucy Barnes is Senior Editor and Outreach Coordinator at Open Book Publishers.