Open Access Publication Funding / 2025-2027 / University of Kassel

• Applicant: Claudia Martin-Konle
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 491046048

The University of Kassel offers a wide range of services to promote Open Access (OA), including the publication fund, which, in addition to the funding of journal articles in quality-assured gold OA journals since 2013, introduced partial funding of OA monographs in 2021. The University of Kassel participates in a total of 14 OA transformative agreements in 2024, enabling its researchers to publish OA in a large number of hybrid and gold OA journals. All funded articles are archived on the institutional repository KOBRA, where they are freely accessible and easy to find. In the first funding phase of the DFG program "Open Access Publication Funding", an OA section with sufficient staff has been officially established in the organizational chart of the University Library. In 2022, the Presidential Board decided to introduce a university bibliography, which is managed in the research information system with the involvement of the University Library and Academic Controlling. A detailed workflow was developed to record publications, including their costs, with the aim of a comprehensive publication monitoring that includes centrally and decentrally financed publication costs and research funding organizations. Measures were taken and tested in coordination with the financial accounting department to record decentralized costs that are not paid by the University Library. The workflows introduced are to be optimized during the second funding phase with regard to recording all costs as completely as possible and improving data quality concerning completeness and standardization of publisher information, research funding organizations, etc. The monitoring system currently being set up forms the basis for a virtual information budget that provides a complete overview of all university expenditure on scientific information and academic publishing in the sense of a targeted OA transformation and the necessary shift from subscription to publication costs.

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