Regensburg – which, as we learned during a guided tour, is known as “Italy’s northernmost city”– welcomed the participants of the 6th Open Access Staff Week under a thick fog. Staff from several university libraries in Bavaria as well as from university libraries in other federal states and other countries had travelled to Regensburg to gain an insight into the areas of work and expertise of their colleagues at Regensburg University Library (UB Regensburg).

Organised by open-access.network, a collaborative project funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the Open Access Staff Weeks give library staff an opportunity to look behind the scenes at other institutions and to learn about best practices as well as current challenges in the implementation of open access.

The varied event programme at UB Regensburg included an informative range of topics: from the university’s publication server, through its publication service and its data hub for services related to research data management, to projects such as openCost and infrastructure offerings such as the Electronic Journals Library (EZB), it attested to the broad-based expertise of the hosts at UB Regensburg around Dr Gernot Deinzer (Head of the IT and Publication Services Department and Open Access Representative of UB Regensburg) and Cornelia Lang, who works in the area of electronic publishing and open access. For individual substantive sessions, they were supported with input and best practice examples by other colleagues. Trainee academic librarians and interns at UB Regensburg also played an active part in the event, thereby further enriching the diversity of perspectives.

The programme included a variety of informative and practice-oriented sessions. Key elements were:

• Repository and costing: Cornelia Lang presented the university’s comprehensive repository, which has been enriched with many additional data, for example on publication costs, publishing agreements, and transformative agreements, and can thus also be used for costing purposes.
• Central invoice processing: Gernot Deinzer presented UB Regensburg’s central invoice processing system, which is important inter alia for the preparation of the information budget and is a response to the challenge posed by increasingly complex data relating to publication costs.
• openCost project: Project coordinator Bianca Schweighofer gave insights into the project, which is in the final phase of its current term and offers a standardised infrastructure for the management of publication costs. One of the topics discussed was how the resulting breakdown of sometimes unclear price structures can enable informed budgetary planning and negotiating power.
• Electronic Journals Library (EZB): Using examples tailored to the participants’ institutions, Silke Weisheit (Head of the EZB and the Database Information System [DBIS]) and Colin Sippl vividly demonstrated how the EZB has been expanded to include key information on open access publishing. In doing so, the EZB wishes to address a target group that has been extended to include publishing authors, who can view the cost and financing details for each journal directly in the EZB catalogue.
• University of Regensburg (UR) Data Hub: The UR Data Hub is a separate central institution at the University of Regensburg. Sophie Stolzenberger and Constantin Lehenmeier (Research Data Management) gave an insight into the services it offers. The participants were able to gain hands-on experience with specially created test accesses to the tools offered.
• University of Regensburg Publication Services: Finally, Nadia Gianfrancesco presented the offerings and processes of the university’s publication services, for which she is responsible. Here, dissertations can be published in open access with a print-on-demand option.

The participants stressed that, besides the first-hand insights gained, one of the most valuable elements of the event was the exchange among themselves. The “Bring your own problem” sessions offered participants an opportunity to actively contribute and discuss their own topics – for example the question of target-group-appropriate communication with researchers from their own institutions or the legal parameters of versions of publications in their institutional repositories. Questions such as “How do you do it?” and “What workflows do you use?” could be discussed in an uncomplicated way. This collegial exchange contributed greatly to the success of the event. In addition, the hosts provided an entertaining social programme: a tour of the campus and the city and a joint dinner created space for personal conversations, thus facilitating further networking.

Conclusion: Despite the rather un-Italian cold and wet November weather, the event left many lasting positive impressions. Many thanks to the hosts in Regensburg and to the committed participants.

The next Open Access Staff Week will probably take place in June at Giessen University Library. For information, see the open-access.network website.

Flemming, D., & Gschwend, S. (2025). Open Access Staff Week an der UB Regensburg. open-access.network. doi.org/10.64395/ct74y-p0796.