Open Access Transformation

In recent years, the Digital Information initiative of the Alliance of Science Organisations (Alliance Initiative for short) has published several position papers on the open access transformation (especially Bruch et al., 2016). The key demands are the anchoring of open access in the libraries, in licensing practice, and in the acquisitions budgets; the gradual reallocation of acquisitions funds; the disclosure of journal subscription costs and open access publication charges and figures; and the development of scalable processes in the libraries. In 2024, the Alliance Initiative published a study on the mapping and description of open access services in Germany (Biela et al., 2024) that reflects the status quo of publicly funded scholarly open access services and infrastructures in Germany

The German Research Foundation (DFG) is a key science policy actor in the open access transformation. It supports the development and operation of open access publication funds and infrastructures with several funding programmes and thus significantly influences developments in these areas. In its positions on research policy, the DFG supports key initiatives such as the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, OA2020, the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access, the  EU Council Conclusions on Scholarly Publishing 2023, and the International Science Council (ISC). It also cooperates with other national and international open access initiatives. Although it supports the efforts of cOAlition S, the DFG does not mandate open access publishing. In two position papers (DFG, 2018; DFG, 2022), it has taken a stance on current challenges in academic publishing

In 2022, the German Science and Humanities Council (Wissenschaftsrat) published comprehensive “Recommendations on the Transformation of Academic Publishing: Towards Open Access” in which it declared that the goal of the transformation was for gold open access to become standard practice for the publication of scientific results. To monitor publication costs and strategically plan the funding of academic publishing in the long term, the Council recommended that scientific institutions establish information budgets.

Projekt DEAL, now known as the DEAL Konsortium, was initiated by the Alliance of German Science Organisations under the leadership of the German Rectors’ Conference with the aim of concluding uniform national licence agreements for all (digital) journals of major commercial academic publishers. The agreements that the DEAL Konsortium concludes on behalf of over 900 eligible institutions have an open access component : Authors affiliated with participating institutions can publish their works open access in the publishers’ subscription-based journals with an open access option (so-called hybrid journals) at no cost to themselves (hence the high proportion of open access publications among the research articles from German institutions). In addition, participating institutions have access to the publisher’s entire journal portfolio. The publication fees are invoiced centrally to the publishers’ contractual partner, DEAL Open Access Services (DEAS) gGmbH, which in turn invoices the participating institutions. To date, DEAL agreements have been concluded with three publishers: Wiley, Springer Nature, and Elsevier.

Forum 13+ was established as an independent working group of experts from German library consortia to coordinate the negotiation of transformative agreements between scientific institutions and small and medium publishers or professional associations – beyond the realm of the major scholarly publishers with whom DEAL transformative agreements have been concluded. In this capacity, the working group has published a guide to the assessment of open access transformative agreements and publishers’ offerings (“Bewertung von Open-Access-Transformationsverträgen und Verlagsangeboten”).

Plan S is an initiative of an international consortium of research performing and research funding organisations (cOAlition S). Since 2021, cOAlitionS has been calling for scholarly publications from publicly funded research to be published in recognized open access journals or on open access platforms or to be made immediately available through open access repositories without an embargo. Joint implementation guidelines are implemented in the funding guidelines of the participating research funders. One key element is a fundamental rejection of hybrid open access, except as part of discernible transformative arrangements. cOAlitionS attaches great importance to cost transparency on the part of publishers. Thus, it reflects the general trend that research funders currently have the most effective and simplest instruments: by linking awards of third-party funding to open access obligations, they can intervene decisively. However, German research funding organisations are not officially members of cOAlitionS.

SCOAP³ – Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics is an international consortium under the leadership of CERN that is dedicated to the promotion of open access in high-energy physics (HEP). It is a globally unique initiative that has converted several key journals in the field of HEP completely to open access without authors having to pay the article processing charges (APCs) themselves. Libraries and organisations from all other the world contribute financially to the project. The level of contributions is based on the publication output of the respective scientific institutions. 

As a consortial model, KOALA enables sustainable funding for diamond open access. Scientific institutions – especially libraries and research performing organisations  – jointly fund journals, which can then switch to a diamond open access model: Thematically focused journal bundles are offered to scientific insitutions for community funding. As soon as the funding target has been reached, the journal is funded for 3 years and is made completely freely accessible. Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology University Library (TIB) in Hanover acts as a central service provider and coordinates the KOALA model as part of its regular operations.

Professional associations are self-organizing bodies that also set professional standards. Some of them have signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, discussed the topic of open access internally (see Bärwollf et al., 2023), or taken a science policy stance on the open access transformation – as, for example, the German Physical Society (DPG) did in a position paper (DPG, 2021) in which it expressed criticism of certain developments in the area of open access.

Besides institutional actors, the researchers themselves have a key role to play in shaping the open access transformation. By choosing an open access publication organ and model, using their secondary publication right, and making their publications available under an open content licence, they can make a decisive contribution to the free accessibility of their research results. Moreover, researchers can set up an open access journal themselves, convert an existing journal to open access (journal flipping), or get involved in scholar-led diamond open access initiatives.