task_categories:
- text-generation
language:
- en
pretty_name: Directory of Open Access Books
Directory of Open Access Books
Description
The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) is an online index of over 94,000 peer-reviewed books curated from trusted open-access publishers.
To collect the openly licensed content from DOAB, we retrieve metadata using their official metadata feed.
We then filter the collection to include only English-language books released under CC BY and CC BY-SA licenses.
The filtered books are downloaded in PDF format and converted to plaintext using the Marker PDF-to-text converter.
As an additional validation step, we manually create a whitelist of open license statements and retain only texts explicitly containing one of these statements in their front- or back-matter.
Per-document license information is available in the license entry of the metadata field of each example.
Code for collecting, processing, and preparing this dataset is available in the common-pile GitHub repo.
Dataset Statistics
| Documents | UTF-8 GB |
|---|---|
| 474,445 | 12.5 |
License Issues
While we aim to produce datasets with completely accurate licensing information, license laundering and inaccurate metadata can cause us to erroneously assign the incorrect license to some documents (for further discussion of this limitation, please see our paper). If you believe you have found an instance of incorrect licensing in this dataset, please start a discussion on this repository.
Other Versions
This is the "raw" version of the DOAB dataset. If you are looking for the filtered version used to train Comma v0.1, you can find it here.
Citation
If you use this dataset, please cite:
@article{kandpal2025common,
title={{The Common Pile v0.1: An 8TB Dataset of Public Domain and Openly Licensed Text}},
author={Nikhil Kandpal and Brian Lester and Colin Raffel and Sebastian Majstorovic and Stella Biderman and Baber Abbasi and Luca Soldaini and Enrico Shippole and A. Feder Cooper and Aviya Skowron and Shayne Longpre and Lintang Sutawika and Alon Albalak and Zhenlin Xu and Guilherme Penedo and Loubna Ben and Elie Bakouch and John David and Honglu Fan and Dashiell Stander and Guangyu Song and Aaron Gokaslan and John Kirchenbauer and Tom Goldstein and Brian R and Bhavya Kailkhura and Tyler Murray},
journal={arXiv preprint},
year={2025}
}