Open Access Publication Funding / 2022-2024 / Universität Marburg

• Applicant: Dr. Andrea Wolff-Wölk
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 491052028

Philipps-Universität Marburg aims to enhance the international visibility of the knowledge produced and research performed by its scientists and to demonstrate its relevance for society. Therefore, in 2015, the university passed an official strategy to promote open access (“Open Access Policy”) and started to support the transition to open access with the development and establishment of suitable information infrastructures and services. In 2016, the university set up a publication funds to finance the costs associated with publishing articles in gold open access journals. The authors of the university were supported with professional advisory services on all facets of open access publishing. This effort led to a substantial increase in the number of open access articles published. Additionally, the university library participates in transformative agreements, employs institutional memberships and supports the open access transformation with substantial parts of its acquisition budget. The university library is responsible for coordinating all open access activities, for providing the advisory services and offering the necessary technical infrastructure, such as repositories for publications and for research data. In the project period, the university library will advise affiliates of Philipps-Universität on financial, technical and legal issues of open access publishing including the implementation of licences, funding acknowledgements and ORCID. Authors will get financial support from the publication funds and help in the administration of the publishing and funding processes. To achieve an improvement especially for the humanities, the publication funds will be expanded to finance the costs associated with publishing of open access books. Also, junior scientists will be supported in this way.At the same time, the library will develop models and introduce structures to identify the costs of all open access publications by corresponding authors of Philipps-Universität, to relate them to costs of transformative agreements and of licences for reading access, to identify the need for subsidies, to control the allocation of appropriations and to improve financial controlling of the expenditures using administrative tools. Acquisition budget and publication funds will be merged into one overall budget for information resources to improve transparency, to allow for future structural adjustment in financial flows, and to facilitate the transformation towards publication-based accounting. While the allowances will be managed in the university library, the cross-departmental collaboration has to be improved to properly calculate the overall costs for open access publications and especially of those resulting from research projects funded by the DFG

• DFG Programme: Science Communication, Research Data, eResearch (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)