At an awards ceremony in the Holzmarkt in Berlin in early July, five projects received an Enter Award for their achievements in the area of open access. In this post, we introduce the award winners once again and recount the highlights of the event.

Funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the Enter Award recognizes outstanding projects in the area of open access. It was awarded for the first time this year. The prizes, in five categories, went to the following projects:

Infrastructure: DeepGreen

• DeepGreen is an automated delivery service for open access journal articles that distributes publisher content – including green, gold, and hybrid open access publications – to institutional and disciplinary repositories based on author affiliations and licensing information

Cooperation: Open Library Badge

• Open Library Badge, an incentive system for libraries, offers certificates for libraries that are actively committed to openness in science and society. Recipients must meet a regularly updated set of criteria that emphasizes open access activities.

Transfer of Expertise: LMU Open Science Center

• The LMU Open Science Center is a university-wide, researcher-led initiative at LMU Munich that offers peer-to-peer training in open science practices and supports communities to establish open research norms. At the same time, it cooperates with stakeholders to push forward political reforms.

Pioneering Achievement: Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research (FQS)

• Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research (FQS) was founded in 1999 by Katja Mruck as an international open access journal for qualitative research. Twenty-five volumes and ca. 2,300 peer-reviewed articles have been published to date in German, English, and Spanish.

Young Hopeful: JuWissBlog

• The JuWissBlog was launched in 2013 as a discussion platform for early career researchers in public law. It publishes between 70 and 140 double-blind peer-reviewed posts annually. The editorial team – consisting of early career researchers in the German-speaking area – also organizes conferences and blog workshops.

At the beginning of the event, moderator Yolanda Rother explained that the aim and mission of the national award is to honour those who make research freely accessible, thereby contributing to the democratization of knowledge. In his welcome address, Alexander Heußner, Deputy Head of Division at the BMBF, stated that the Enter Award promotes openness and freedom in science. He highlighted the variety and broad range of open access projects shortlisted by the jury.

The seven-member jury comprised Prof. Dr jur. Ellen Euler, Lambert Heller, Dr Christina Riesenweber, Dr Anne-Sophie Waag, Dr Karin Werner, Prof. Dr Leonhard Dobusch and Dr Anja Oberländer. Five jury members were present at the awards ceremony, where they advocated increasing the importance of open access for society as a whole by further opening science so that more and more people can participate. In addition, they stressed the necessity to engage with those who criticize open access.

The programme of the festive awards ceremony at the Berlin event location Holzmarkt included a podium discussion between the moderator, Yolanda Rother, and Professor Heinz Pampel, who teaches and researches in the area of information management at the Berlin School of Library and Information Science (IBI) at Humboldt-Universität. Pampel expressed the view that although progress towards more open access publications has been achieved, a transition from closed to open access has not yet occurred in many places, for example at many journals of the major publishing groups. He mentioned promising open access developments in other countries, for example Switzerland's new open access strategy, Japan's substantial investments in infrastructures conducive to open access, and the requirement that all federal agencies in the United States must provide open access to taxpayer-funded publications.

Further photos of the award winners and the event can be found in the press area of the project website. The Enter Award team is currently summarising the main takeaways from this first awards ceremony and is working on institutionalising the competition. Information about current developments is provided on the Enter Award website and in the Enter Award Newsletter.

Lammers, A., & Steinhau, H. (2024). Neuer bundesweiter Open-Access-Preis „Enter-Award 2024“ erstmals bei einer Veranstaltung in Berlin verliehen. open-access.network. doi.org/10.64395/avcvy-bmz16.