Diamond Open Access and Self-Archiving in Focus at the 2024 oa.barcamp at Göttingen State and University Library

On 14 and 15 May, over 70 stakeholders from all over Germany, Austria, and Switzerland came together at the fourth oa.barcamp at Göttingen State and University Library (SUB Göttingen) to exchange views and ideas on the status quo, current challenges, and future of open access. The event was organised by the University of Konstanz and the SUB within the framework of the project open-access.network, which is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

Compared with traditional conferences, a BarCamp is an open event format. In contrast to a programme set in advance with pre-determined presentations, workshops, and speakers, the participants themselves decide on site what they want to talk about and in what framework.

The Central Library at SUB Göttingen was an ideal setting for the BarCamp. In the Digital Creative Space (DCS), whose atmosphere benefited the open and rather relaxed character of the conference, the participants had the opportunity at the start of the event to pitch to the other attendees their many ideas and topic suggestions for sessions – be they workshops, round tables, or presentations – which ranged from funding possibilities for fair open access, through the challenges of self-archiving services and the monitoring of open access publications, to the networking of open access projects.

After this "session pitching", all participants were asked to vote for their preferred topics. From the thus selected topics, the organisers put together and finalised the programme while the participants were getting to know each other at a speed dating session on the sunny campus.

First up after a break for lunch was a session on financing diamond open access. Following a short presentation by Mamta Dwivedi, project manager of the Diamond Thinking project, which is based at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the around 50 participants discussed ways of financing open access publications that go beyond article processing charges (APCs) and book processing charges (BPCs). The need for alternative and fair funding models was stressed – not least because of the high and upward-trending costs associated with APC-financed media and the DEAL agreements. It was noted that, although project funding time and again enables the founding of new diamond open access journals or the conversion of closed access journals to open access, sustainable financing is lacking once the term of the respective projects ends. Alternative funding models offer a possible solution. Examples such as the Open Library of Humanities and the KOALA project have shown that crowdfunding models can work, but also that follow-on financing is not guaranteed. Moreover, budgetary issues make it difficult for academic libraries to participate in such models.

The question of what libraries can do to support non-commercial forms of open access in a targeted way was also discussed at the next session. A comprehensive report on that workshop is available here.

On the second day, one workshop dealt intensively with the design and implementation of open access policies and with how existing open access policies would have to be overhauled in the direction of a comprehensive publication policy against the backdrop of the further development of the open access transformation.

Sub-groups addressed the aspects "process and implementation", "content", and "scholar-led publishing". It was stressed that, when creating open access policies, it is important that there should be a participatory process in which scientists and management are involved from the very beginning. Furthermore, the implementation of the policies should be monitored against quantified goals and supported by concrete measures that are regularly checked in terms of their target groups and content and adapted accordingly. Training offerings should be continually repeated, and multipliers should be involved in order to ensure that the content corresponds to the needs of the target groups. In addition to topics such as open licences, the use of existing open access agreements, and research assessment and publication diversity, two other basic elements of an open access policy were mentioned, namely, first publication and secondary publication/self-archiving. Instead of a policy devoted purely to open access, a more comprehensive policy on scholarly publishing would be conceivable.

A further subgroup discussed TU Dresden's publication policy and gathered feedback from various institutions. It turned out that although many institutions already have open access policies or publication policies, they often prefer an overarching publication policy that covers all aspects of scholarly publishing. It was noted that the advantages of such a comprehensive policy are the bundling of all relevant information for authors and institutions and the strengthening of libraries as central contact points.

The large number of participants in the workshop on self-archiving services, which was delivered by Franziska Deuter of Bamberg University Library (UB Bamberg), shows that the topic is also of great relevance to academic libraries and publishers; both groups were represented in the plenum. Deuter provided detailed insights into the workflows and service offerings that UB Bamberg has established for the university's researchers and the works that they self-archive in the institutional repository. The subsequent lively discussion examined the topic of green open access from different angles, for example with regard to liability issues and publishers' policies. Further relevant topics were advisory services for doctoral candidates and the handling of concrete everyday tasks such as the creation of cover pages. If you would like further information on key aspects of the topic, you can take a look at the guidelines on self-archiving services provided by open-access.network.

Several projects in the area of open access availed of the opportunity to give the community insights into their activities.

In one of the first sessions, Victoria Jahrmarkt presented PANTER, a project that got underway last autumn. Its aims are to create a reliable price monitor that will enable publishing authors to obtain an overview of the current price landscape and to make price trends for publication services visible and comparable. In the subsequent joint discussion, the participants were invited to design a fictional persona, and thus to imagine a concrete user of the monitor. This playful approach vividly highlighted the target-group-specific challenges for the tool.

In one of the subsequent sessions, Markus Putnings presented OS-APS STEMO, a project dedicated to a very different task. Putnings demonstrated how the open source software developed within the framework of the project can support institutional publishers (e.g., repositories, OJS hosting platforms, or university presses) in ensuring barrier-free digital accessibility. He also provided a cloud software so that participants could try this out for themselves.

The latter two projects provided an insight into the bandwidth of topics that are being addressed in the current open access project landscape. What an overview of this landscape might look like and how possible synergies can be identified was the subject of a further session on open access projects – specifically, on the offering of open-access-network's oa.hub, which you can find here.

The thematic sessions were supplemented with exciting framework programme elements. At the end of the first day of the BarCamp, the SUB opened the gates to its Historical Building and the otherwise locked door of the Heyne Reading Room. The second day began with a refinement of the first day's results with Lilja Sautter, a product owner at the SUB who is involved in the open-access.network project, and Kay Liewald, an agile coach at the SUB. The exchanges on the first day and the possibility to change perspectives were particularly highlighted. At the same time, using the 1-2-4-all method demonstrated here, Sautter and Liewald provided an insight into the agile project work at the SUB and gave the participants a tool for optimising their own work processes.

The BarCamp in Göttingen showed once again that this format is excellently suited to exchanges within the open access community. The SUB Göttingen shone with its very suitable facilities, in which the around 75 participants felt at home during the two days. At the concluding session, both the organisers and the participants expressed their all-round satisfaction and were generous in their praise of everything from the organisation, through the catering, to the framework programme, which enabled them to continue conversations outside the sessions and to network.

The next oa.barcamp will take place in spring 2025. Details of the venue, date, and registration possibilities will be announced on open-access.network.