Registration now open: workshop "Journals in the open access transformation"

Registration for the workshop is now open, an agenda will follow.

We will present B!SON as one of five BMBF-funded projects dealing with various aspects of Open Access journals in a workshop on May 19, 2022.

The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is currently funding 20 projects to promote the transformation of scientific publishing towards Open Access (Website in German). Some of these projects will present their interim results to the interested public on May 19, 2022 (9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.). The workshop is primarily aimed at editors and editorial teams of journals and operators of journal platforms, in short, at everyone who is technically or organizationally involved in the publication of journals. The event will be held in German language and take place online; participation is free. More information and registration will follow.

The following projects will present their work status and discuss it with the participants:

BISON: In the B!SON project, TIB and SLUB are developing a recommendation system for Open Access journals. Based on parts of a manuscript to be published (title, abstract, references), the recommendation system identifies quality-assured Open Access journals in which similar articles have been published. The determination of similarity is based on machine learning and uses both semantic and bibliometric methods. Open data corpora are used as the data basis for the similarity comparison (DOAJ article metadata, OpenCitations citation relationships). B!SON is primarily aimed at publishing scientists. A local integration of B!SON (e.g. in library services) will be possible; it can therefore support publication advice in particular.

CODRIA: The aim of the CODRIA project is to comprehensively examine the performance, efficiency and functionality of diamond OA journals. In detail, the project is intended to answer the questions of what role this type of journal currently plays in the German OA landscape, how high the costs for each publication are to be quantified and what scope and challenges are associated with the operation of these journals. The goal is operationalized by three sub-questions:

  • Does the performance of diamond OA journals differ from other OA journals?
  • What is the cost of running diamond OA journals and the cost per publication?
  • How do the editors of diamond OA journals manage to deal with the different scientific, economic and organizational requirements?

KOALA: The KOALA project establishes consortium solutions for financing Open Access, and enables joint financing of Open Access journals and book series by academic libraries and other stakeholders as an alternative to the APC model, where articles are paid for individually by authors or their institutions. The infrastructure created by KOALA enables fair and sustainable financing of quality-assured Open Access publications.

OPTIMETA: The OPTIMETA project aims to strengthen the Open Access publication system by integrating open citations and spatiotemporal metadata from Open Access journals into openly accessible data sources. This contributes to open research information and ensures better findability and thus visibility of open access publications, which in turn increases the attractiveness of open access journals as a place of publication.

Scholar-led Plus: The Scholar-led Plus project wants to improve the publication situation of publisher-independent, fee-free Open Access Gold journals through a collaborative support structure. The focus is on financing, consulting and benchmarking, with small, trans- and interdisciplinary contexts in particular being addressed. In addition, the project explores the possibilities of collaborative support of Open Access in surveys, workshops and focus groups.