PEPA, the UNE Publishers' Open Publishing Platform, is born

PEPA has been conceived as an interoperable platform aligned with international standards for scholarly communication. It aims to facilitate the preservation, management and dissemination of scholarly knowledge, strengthening the visibility of university publishing output and the sector's commitment to open science.

The project seeks to promote a university publishing ecosystem that is more accessible, connected and aligned with European open access policies, while helping to strengthen the international presence of research published in Spanish by universities and research centres.

The initiative has been funded by the María de Guzmán Grants of the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) and consolidates the role of university publishers as strategic actors in the development of a more open, equitable and socially responsible scientific communication system.

Main features of PEPA

The platform incorporates several key elements that reinforce the open scholarly publishing model:

• Open access to knowledge.
  The monographs available on PEPA can be freely consulted and downloaded, allowing anyone to have free access to the research results published by university publishers.
• Digital preservation
  As a digital repository, PEPA will contribute to ensure the long-term preservation of scholarly works, facilitating their conservation and future availability.
• Diamond Route Publishing Model
  The platform reflects the commitment of university publishers to this open access model, in which neither authors pay to publish nor readers pay to access, with the academic institutions supporting the publishing and dissemination of knowledge.
• Editorial quality and ethics
  The monographs included in PEPA comply with the editorial quality standards typical of university publishers, guaranteeing transparency in the evaluation processes and traceability of the contents.
• Responsible evaluation of research
  PEPA is aligned with the principles of DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) and CoARA (Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment), promoting more qualitative evaluation approaches and less reliance on purely journal-based metrics.
• Interoperable data ecosystem
  The platform complies with FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles, making content easily findable, accessible and integrable with other scientific information systems.

Navigation and access to content

PEPA will allow users to browse the catalogue using different criteria: books, chapters, collections, areas of knowledge, authors or publishers, as well as to identify works with the CEA-APQ quality seal in academic publishing.

Each publication will include complete bibliographic information, among them:

• title and authorship
• publisher and collection
• ISBN, DOI and ORCID identifiers
• subject area
• year of publication and edition
• language
• abstract and keywords

In addition, the platform will provide information on the licence of use, download and metadata export options, citation recommendations and, where a printed version exists, links to purchase through the corresponding publisher or Unebook.

Presentation of the platform

The official presentation of PEPA will take place on 17 March 2026 at 16:00 at the FECYT headquarters, located at the National Museum of Science and Technology (MUNCYT) in Alcobendas (Madrid).

The event can also be followed live on UNE's YouTube channel.

In the days leading up to the event, UNE has launched a communication campaign on social networks aimed at the academic community to raise awareness of this new initiative by Spanish university publishers.