Open Access Publication Funding 2026 - 2028 / University of Tübingen

• Applicant: Regine Tobias
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 512539761

The University of Tübingen is consistently advancing its Open Access strategy and, through this follow-up project, aims to strengthen the structural, financial, and technical foundations for scholarly publishing in Open Access. The goal is to consolidate the milestones achieved during the previous funding phase and to sustainably embed them into the university’s institutional framework. The project addresses three core areas of action: First, Open Access publication management will be further expanded, with a particular focus on the humanities. A new publication fund for Open Access books will be established and workflows will be integrated into the institution's own infrastructure and automated. The University Library’s advisory services will be further integrated to provide targeted support to researchers throughout the entire publication process. Second, an integrated information budget for publication-related expenses will be technically and organizationally anchored. The objective is to implement a comprehensive monitoring system for expenditures and funding sources, enhancing transparency and enabling a data-driven, governance-ready planning process in the context of the Open Access transformation. Third, the technical infrastructure will be renewed through the migration to a modern repository system – while maintaining the established open-source architecture and the principles of collaboratively developed, community-driven software. This will provide the foundation for a machine-readable data space that systematically integrates publication, financial, and funding data, and makes them usable for reporting, monitoring, and long-term preservation. The new system is intended to support the in-depth indexing of all forms of scholarly dissemination in the long term and to enable automated, non-redundant metadata capture according to the “deposit once” principle. The aim is to record publication data as early and consistently as possible and to make it seamlessly available for the University of Tübingen’s entire dissemination management. This improves data quality, enhances reusability, and reduces manual effort in favor of integrated and efficient workflows. This also includes the implementation of standardized interfaces to ensure smooth integration into (inter)national data infrastructures such as OpenAIRE and the Open Access Monitor. By doing so, the University of Tübingen not only strengthens its local governance structures in the area of Open Access but also develops interoperable, reusable, and long-term accessible solutions that are designed to be transferable to other institutions.

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