PRISM Peer Review Service for Open Access Books Officially Launched

The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), a community-driven discovery service for open access books, is launching its Peer-Review-Information-Service-for-Monographs (PRISM). PRISM is a service provided by DOAB as part of the OPERAS service portfolio.

PRISM is a standardised way for academic publishers to display information about their peer review processes across their entire catalogue. On the DOAB site, you can see a PRISM logo next to a publisher and next to the individual book. PRISM peer review information is also included at the metadata level, making it available through the DOAB API which is freely distributed and incorporated into library search tools worldwide. Learn more about PRISM, including how to participate as a publisher here. Pierre Mounier, OPERAS Coordinator (Community) and co-director of DOAB, points out:

We are glad to launch officially the PRISM service to bring more transparency to the quality assurance process for books. PRISM was initially developed thanks to European funding through the projects HIRMEOS and OPERAS-P. It is the result of several years of collaboration between DOAB, OAPEN and OPERAS to better understand and serve the needs of researchers and the scholarly communication community in the humanities and social sciences. We aim at providing support to open access books with PRISM and we hope that the service will be widely adopted by OA book publishers,

How can PRISM help me?

PRISM’s goal is to provide transparency about the peer review process(es) that apply to their works. This helps build trust in open access academic book publishing.

• For publishers: PRISM helps you display the peer review process that has been applied to works in your collection. This helps you showcase how you apply best practices in peer review.
• For librarians: PRISM allows you to see the quality control process that applies to a given work. This will give you confidence in recommending the work as a reliable source to your researchers and students.
• For funders: PRISM gives you more detailed information about the quality assurance process of the research outputs you’ve funded.
• For researchers, students, or general readers: PRISM allows you to see the quality control process that applies to a given work. This will give you more information about the publisher.

More information: https://doabooks.org/en/publishers/prism

If you want to learn more about PRISM:

• The German national node OPERAS-GER will discuss the PRISM service on 17 November 2022 at 11.00 CET in their regular OPERAS Open Chat series together with OAPEN (Registration).

• An online webinar in English to introduce PRISM for is planned for March 6, 2023, at 15 CET. Register in advance for this meeting (click here). After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

About DOAB

The Directory of Open Access Books is a discovery service indexing over 60,000 open access books from 600+ publishers from around the world. The DOAB is a service of the DOAB Foundation, a non-profit established by the OAPEN Foundation and OpenEdition.

About OPERAS

PRISM is part of the OPERAS Services Portfolio. OPERAS is the European Research Infrastructure for the development of open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities with the aim to coordinate and federate resources in Europe to efficiently address the scholarly communication needs of European researchers in the field of social sciences and humanities (SSH). DOAB and OPERAS collaborate for the development and dissemination of the PRISM service. OPERAS provides more services to support open scholarly communication in SSH.

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The PRISM service has been developed by funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreements No 731102 (HIRMEOS) and No 871069 (OPERAS-P).

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