This year's Open-Access-Tage the central conference on open access in the German-speaking world, took place in Cologne from September 10 to 12. Under the conference motto DEAL, Diamond and beyond –- Open Access between sovereignty and dependence, around 300 participants met on site and many more attended online. The PID Network Germany project was also represented on site.
Over three days, there was a diverse programme consisting of three keynotes, two discussions, ten sessions with a total of 30 presentations, 19 workshops, a poster session and the tool marketplace, as well as a supporting programme such as a conference dinner and guided tours through the libraries of the organising institutions.
Persistent identifiers (PIDs) were primarily presented as an important contextual topic at the Open Access Days. Whether in publication infrastructures, in various monitoring scenarios, in software and tools or in the billing modalities of transformation contracts - persistent identifiers play a role at least everywhere where precise identification and attribution as well as good and complete metadata and their linking are required. In the poster session, we presented our poster Persistent Identifiers for open and FAIR Science and were able to exchange ideas with many interested parties, especially about the PIDs commonly used for text publications, journals and books. In the session on consortia and funding models, Judith Ludwig (German National Library of Science and Technology) reported on the status of the global SCOAP3 initiative, which aims to achieve 100% open access in the field of high-energy physics, and emphasised the importance of ROR IDs. These are indispensable for clearly identifying the institutional affiliation of the authors of the articles from SCOAP3 for the purpose of allocating funding, but manual checks and controls are still necessary in some cases due to ambiguous affiliation information. The relevance of ROR IDs was also emphasised in the presentation openCost in practice: Transmission and evaluation of cost data to openAPC as part of the DFG Open Access Publication Costs programme in the session on costs and transparency; here they are used in the metadata schema of openAPC and openCost to uniquely identify institutions that pay publication costs. In the same session, the benefits of DOIs for the retrieval of publication metadata and the resulting significant reduction in manual data collection effort were also noted in the presentation Development of standardised publication and cost monitoring: experiences from the DFG's Open Access Publication Costs programme in collaboration with the Transform2Open and openCost projects. At the tool marketplace, a team from the German Information Technology Library and the Technical University of Dresden presented various tools and plugins for OJS, including the PID Manager and the plugin for ROR IDs, under the title Metadata Almanac for Open Access Journals. The session on infrastructures and best practices was also interesting, with a presentation by Andrea Hacker (University of Bern) on dealing with and best practices when discontinuing a scientific journal. When a journal is discontinued or relocated, numerous technical questions naturally arise, including whether it is ensured whether and how PIDs in the sense of permalinks will continue to lead to the journal's articles (remain resolvable) or whether they may suddenly no longer be accessible. PIDs were of course also discussed in workshops, for example in the workshop Science blogs as a blueprint for science-led open access publishing, which focussed on blogs as publication formats for science communication and also presented solutions for workflows for assigning PIDs, including relevant metadata for blog posts.
All keynotes and sessions as well as the panel discussion were broadcasted freely accessible via livestream. The streams are also available afterwards on the ZB MED YouTube channel. Later, the presentations will also be published individually on the TIB's AV portal. In addition, much of the content, such as the posters and presentation slides, will gradually be published in the Zenodo-Community of the Open Access Days 2024.
If you want to find out more about the conference and which topics were addressed in the presentations and workshops, we recommend the report from the Helmholtz Open Science Office. Next year, the German-speaking Open Access community will meet in Constance from 17 to 19 September 2025.