SOAP is the abbreviation for Stichting OpenAccess Platforms. Setting up a foundation in the Netherlands requires including the word ‘Stichting’ (Foundation) in the name. Open access is what we are, and providing platforms is what we do. The foundation began its activities during the COVID-19 pandemic (fall 2020), when washing our hands multiple times a day became routine. So, why not SOAP: a good acronym and a sign of the times.
SOAP offers affordable and fast solutions for the dissemination of research content in the arts, architecture, built environment, and design domains. We host open access e-print, pre-print, conference proceedings, book, and journal archives. The definition of 'research content' includes ‘art,’ 'design,' 'engineering,' or 'planning,' as long as that design, engineering, or planning contributes to the body of knowledge in their respective fields. The open access label we use for all submitted, accepted, and published publications that we handle is CC-BY-4.0. We do not deal with delayed or limited open access content.
The content served by SOAP derives from multiple sources, publishers, designers, institutes and societies and is presented on an equal basis. The platform respects the identity of participating universities, publishers, designers, and content developers. It allows unique URLs, logo's and names. We will not force an identity upon you that isn't you.
SOAP is managed by a non-profit foundation based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Stichting OpenAccess. We are not in the business to sell hard copy books, but wo do like to work with 'traditional' publishers in the arts, architecture, built environment and design domain. In such situations we provide the open access services to authors and editors.
Because SOAP doesn't aim for an overall brand status, it deliberately choose a label that is as generic as possible, using an neutral, easy to remember but high-value .ac domain name. openaccess.ac tells you that we provide open access and that we are academic. The core business of SOAP is to provide online e-print/pre-print/book/journal archive services. We can provide additional publishing services such as journal hosting, and also book publishing, if you require those in combination with your open access publications. Publications that we developed, designed and host appear in the catalogue. SOAP uses primarily open source software solutions like open journal system (OJS), open monograph press (OMP), open pre-print server (OPS) developed by PKP, JOOMLA!, Grav, CiviCRM and dSPACE.