The Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) is a not-for-profit association of Open Access (OA) stakeholders (publishers, infrastructure services) committed to meeting defined quality criteria and establishing standards within the OA publishing process. Founded by ten participants in October 2008 during the Open Access Days in London, the association now numbers about 240 members worldwide.
In close collaboration with organisations such as the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), OASPA was able to develop a set of criteria that has become a benchmark for transparency, amongst other areas in the scholarly publishing process. This is reflected in the fact that funding organisations such as the German Research Foundation (DFG), as well as many universities (such as the University of Graz, see https://ub.uni-graz.at/en/research-publish/fake-journals-predatory-publishing/), recommend checking whether a proposed publisher is a member of OASPA before making a decision.
At the beginning of July 2024, Graz University Library Publishing also successfully completed the rigorous admission process and can proudly call itself an OASPA member publisher (Professional Publisher - Small): https://www.oaspa.org/membership/current-members/. Following our admission to the AG Universitätsverlage (University Publishers Working Group, as we reported in April), this is another important step demonstrating that our publications and the publication process as a whole meet international quality criteria. Of course, we will not stop there; other goals are the inclusion of our publications in the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and the Online Library and Publication Platform (OAPEN) to increase their visibility further.
If you are interested in publishing your research with Graz University Library Publishing, please contact us at ub.publikationsservices(at)uni-graz.at or visit our website. We look forward to working with you on your project!