Supporting the Transition to Open Access: Platform Development, Content Dissemination, and AI Tools

Summary In the Humanities and Social Sciences, although there are many factors working against it, book publications—monographs, edited books, scholarly editions—still play a crucial role. As with long-form publications, multilingual scholarly output is increasingly being displaced by indexing databases and research assessment systems, despite the fact that multilingualism is inherent to SSH research. By developing an open access publication platform our goal is to serve a multilingual research community with a focus on the Central European region. We believe that open access publishing with discovery and translation services in an AI-assisted ecosystem can bring about a paradigm shift in scholarly communication and research evaluation. L'Harmattan Publishing House (Budapest), a charitable for-profit organization launched its Open Access book publishing platform in 2022, publishing mainly Hungarian, English, German and French peer reviewed monographs, edited books and scholarly editions. Today, more than 120 volumes are available on openaccess.pub under a free license with detailed metadata. The poster presents the first results of a research and development project we started in 2024 aimed at developing freely available AI-based research support tools. The presentation will provide insights into the development of an AI-assisted multilingual discovery and an AI-enabled content extraction tool. We will also briefly demonstrate the OA book publication policy and funding models of L’Harmattan Open Access in line with the recently published PALOMERA Recommendations for Open Access Books.