Supporting the Transition to Open Access | Poster Presented in OASPA 2025 Conference

L'Harmattan Publishing House (Budapest) launched its Open Access book publishing platform in 2022, focusing on the fields of Humanities and Social Sciences primarily in the Central European region. Each year, we publish approximately 40–60 peer-reviewed OA monographs, edited books, and scholarly editions mainly in Hungarian, English, German, and French. We aim to serve the diversity of research communities by developing a multilingual open access publication platform designed for longform publications.

As a charitable for-profit organization, we work closely with research performing and funding institutions. We help our authors and editors find the right financing model for their publications, striving to have as many Diamond Open Access publications as possible. Quality assurance of scholarly content is particularly important to us, so we collaborate with research institutions and book series editorial boards to promote the peer review process and ensure compliance with formal criteria. Currently, we are working with nearly 20 institutions from 4 countries to achieve our shared goals in OA transition.

Our poster demonstrates three important areas of our work as an OA book publisher: the development of the publishing platform, the distribution and archiving of the titles, and the integration of AI tools.

Platform Development

During the development of the platform, we based our work on the FAIR Principles and the Palomera Recommendations for Open Access Books. The number of open access recommendations and policies that deal with the aspects of books was negligible before the Palomera project. The data collections, interviews, reports and the Recommendations which has been published last year have filled this gap. It discusses in detail what the main actors can do to promote and support OA book publishing. We are really thankful for the project because it helps us to rethink our workflows and policies, and also because it supports policymaking by addressing all relevant stakeholders directly.

From our perspective, multilingualism in research is a highly important value to take care of, and we are committed to promoting it. Language diversity is both reflected in the language of our editions and in their metadata. We always provide metadata in the original language of the book and in English. We create rich and qualified metadata in collaboration with authors and editors, libraries, co-publishers (usually university presses), and with Thoth Open Metadata. Advanced export and import in KBART and RIS format, and harvesting functions according to the OAI-PMH protocol are under development. We also use persistent IDs (DOI, ORCID, and ROR), and Creative Commons licenses (usually CC BY NC SA, but authors can choose).

Distribution and Archiving

We believe that dissemination of OA books is a key element of the publication process. Our mission is to distribute our publications as widely as possible on the web, reaching audience through different research databases or catalogues and via common search engines. Our primary goal is to increase the number of Diamond OA publications and decrease the number of Gold OA publications. However, we also leave open the possibility of purchasing printed editions, the distribution of which is carried out by L’Harmattan Budapest and Éditions L’Harmattan.

• The international distribution is managed by Thoth Open Metadata. Thanks to their persistent efforts, our titles are submitted to several databases such as OAPEN&DOAB, EBSCO, different ProQuest collections, Google Books, and Web of Science.
• Local integration is also important for supporting the research community. For this reason, all of our titles are included in the Hungarian Science Bibliography (collecting all researchers’ publications affiliated in Hungarian institutions) and COMPASS (Discovery service for scholarly content available in Hungary both OA and under paywall) among others.
• Our titles are archived by the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences: they maintain a qualified Repository for this purpose (REAL), and also by the Thoth Archiving Network, and the Internet Archive.
• Taking Search Engine Optimization into account, full text and metadata of our titles are indexed
• We are represented in social media: LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook, and host a blog series dealing with open access policies, news, and opportunities.
• Print editions are also usually available for our OA books, the distribution is managed locally by L’Harmattan Budapest and worldwide by Éditions L’Harmattan as we are part of the Groupe L’Harmattan.

AI for OA

How AI tools can help open access publishing? As a small publisher we are of course not capable and not really in the interest of building a universal AI chatbot. Our vision is to support multilinguality in research by AI tools, opening up our collection of books to a wider audience. Our aim is to create an AI-assisted multilingual search engine and AI-enabled content summarizer.

In the first phase, we created the basic infrastructure enabling multilingual semantic search and content extraction. We have created a text segmentation and processing environment specified for PDF files; integrated large language models (namely diverse OpenAI LLMs and embedding models); we have set up a vector database (Milvus); and created the embedding infrastructure. For providing the communication between the different modules, we established the basic API architecture. Our poster also includes an infographic that introduces the architectural components.

Would you like more details or to discuss potential cooperation? We are always open to discussing and collaborating on our research and development project or the future of scholarly publishing. Please don't hesitate to contact us!

Acknowledgements

We are really thankful to the Library and Information Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTAK) and the Electronic Information Service National Programme (EISZ) to their continuous professional support, to the Thoth Open Metadata team for distribution and professional materials, to Zengo for platform development, and to AI Origo for AI research and development.

Project "Development of the openaccess.pub platform", project ID: 2020-2.1.1-ED-2024-00330 funded by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office, Hungary.