Open Access publication costs / 2022-2024 / University of Duisburg-Essen

• Applicant: Nicole Walger
• Subject Area: Education Systems and Educational Institutions
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 491478386

Open minded - this guiding principle describes the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) as one of the youngest German universities of the 21st century. In doing so, it is guided by its maxims "Strong in Research - Rich in Teaching - Diverse".High-level research, innovation, internationality and interdisciplinarity complete the picture of the principles that shape the UDE. Worldwide unrestricted and permanent accessibility of scientific information is an essential prerequisite for this. A high degree of accessibility and the associated increased visibility of a university's scientific output are achieved through the principle of Open Access (OA) in the sense of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, to which the UDE is a signatory and which is also taken up in its OA declaration.On its way to OA transformation, the UDE is focusing on diversity and is testing various approaches for their viability, such as consortial models, e.g. the Open Library of Humanities or the transcript Open Library Political Science, participation in the DEAL project or offering alternative publication options.Since 2018, a joint project of the university management, the University Library and the Faculty of Medicine has not only been further developing OA funding in the areas of OA gold journal publications, OA transformation contracts and OA monograph funding, but also monitoring changes in the publication market and developing new structures for a successful and contemporary OA transformation.This is where the DFG funding programme "Open Access Publication Costs" comes in, whose overarching goal is to enable structural adjustments for the OA transformation and to improve cost transparency with regard to OA publication costs. This is also an important concern of the UDE, which not only intends to contribute to the improvement of scientific output by promoting OA publications, but also wants to enable transparency about the publication costs of the university as a whole.Currently, there is no central funding and publication information for the entire university, but only information from central OA funding funds and decentralised cost recording by the faculties or third-party funded projects. Central structures should be created here that make the path to OA transformation transparent and easy to implement.The aim of this application is to advance the UDE on its way to a successful OA transformation and to effectively support scientists in their publication process.

• DFG Programme: Science Communication, Research Data, eResearch (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Co-Investigator: Katrin Falkenstein-Feldhoff