Around 90 participants came together on 24 September 2024 for an online workshop entitled “Gemeinsam geht es besser – Kooperationen auf dem Weg zum Informationsbudget” [It’s Better Together – Cooperations on the Way to an Information Budget]. It was the fourth online workshop in the series “Finanzielle Gestaltung der Open-Access-Transformation an Hochschulen und Wissenschaftseinrichtungen” [Financial Organization of the Open Access Transformation at Universities and Scientific Institutions] – a joint offering of Bielefeld University Library and Helmholtz Open Science Office within the framework of open-access.network, a project funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

Despite the diversity of framework conditions and requirements at scientific institutions, similar questions always arise regarding information budgets. At this workshop, various forms and aspects of cooperation were presented.

The two reports by Lea Satzinger and Henrieke Walter from the Kooperationsverbund Thüringer Hochschulbibliotheken [Thuringian University Libraries’ Cooperation Network] showed with impressive clarity that even very different institutions can find points of contact for collaboration. In the Thuringian network, for example, a total of five working groups are working on the topics of acquisition and collection management, open access, information literacy, library use, and IT infrastructure. In addition, joint workshops on information budgets are organized, and the network provides cross-university services, namely, the repository Digitale Bibliothek Thüringen [Digital Library Thuringia] and a joint Open Access Monitoring. The specific conditions at universities of applied sciences (HAWs) are the subject of a current survey by the project Open Access an HAWs.

Successful paths can also be taken through intra-institutional cooperations. Peter Blume from the Technische Universität (TU) Ilmenau reported on the close cooperation between the Executive Board, the faculties, and the library, which are jointly developing an independent and sustainable funding strategy for open access. This strategy is based on the classification of publication costs as part of the research costs to which the faculties contribute. This has resulted in a joint dedicated financial fund for the libraries and the faculties. Lea Satzinger presented various monitoring and reporting tools from the Thuringian University and State Library in Jena.

Joint monitoring of costs for the 42 participating universities in North Rhine-Westphalia were the focus of the presentation on the cooperation community Digitale Hochschule NRW (DH-NRW) [Digital University North Rhine-Westphalia ]. Jan-Philip Tummes and Nina Schönfelder presented the structure of the cost reports and showed by way of example how the costs for open access publications are distributed at individual universities. Creating such a detailed overview for all universities in the state is possible only through the state-wide cooperation.

In the final presentation, Margit Schön and Irene Barbers spoke about the motivation, work methods, and concrete results of the focus group “Information Budget”. The establishment of the focus group was prompted by the “Recommendations on the Transformation of Academic Publishing – Towards Open Access” published by the German Science and Humanities Council (Wissenschaftsrat) in early 2022, in which scientific institutions were recommended to “record all components of their information budget and balance possible savings on the acquisition side as well as possible sources of income against rising expenditure on publication services” (Wissenschaftsrat, 2022, p. 9)¹ As this is a truly mammoth task that can be accomplished only through cooperation, the focus group “Information Budget” was established at the 2022 Open-Access-Tage conference in Bern. Its main aim is to work together and engage in exchange – specifically, to: “Identify needs and prerequisites, define necessary fields of action, and then formulate and discuss possible measures.” (see blog post by Margit Schön and Heike Stadler). One of several useful outputs of the focus group is a set of PowerPoint slides with argumentation aids that can be used and adapted by scientific institutions for their internal discussions with decision-makers.

The concluding discussion focused inter alia on the recording of publication funds from third-party-funded projects and on strategies for dealing with payments that have not yet been recorded. The slides of the workshop presentations have been published in open access and are linked on the event web page.

¹ Source: Recommendations on the Transformation of Academic Publishing – Towards Open Access (2022, p. 9). Wissenschaftsrat. https://www.wissenschaftsrat.de/download/2022/9477-22_en

Dammann, K., & Schultze-Motel, P. (2024). In Kooperation gemeinsam Ziele erreichen. open-access.network. doi.org/10.64395/mr725-k8f05.