With a total of seven million euros in funding, the state of Lower Saxony, together with the VolkswagenStiftung (Volkswagen Foundation), is aiming to strengthen the digitisation of academic libraries. The funds come from the programme zukunft.niedersachsen. Around half of the sum is earmarked to support the establishment of a state-wide and cross-library open access publication fund under the auspices of the Lower Saxony Advisory Council for Library Affairs. Lower Saxony's Minister of Science and Research, Falko Mohrs, hopes that the state funding will accelerate the implementation of the open access transition within the framework of the Joint Guidelines of the Federal Government and the Länder on open access published in June (open-access.network reported).
Open access publication fund
Open access publication funds are an instrument through which academic institutions support their authors in paying open access publication fees. This often includes the reimbursement of APCs or BPCs, but also the promotion of consortial offerings, OA infrastructures or funds for the transformation of subscription journals to OA journals. Scientific organisations thus contribute to the financial support of OA publications.
Digital long-term archiving and text recognition
A further 3.5 million euros will be made available to support the digital long-term archiving of publications and the development of new approaches to text recognition in the digitisation of historical documents, taking artificial intelligence into account. The call for funding (in German) can be found on the website of the VolkswagenStiftung.
- To the original press release of the Lower Saxony Ministry for Science and Culture (in German): https://www.mwk.niedersachsen.de/startseite/aktuelles/presseinformationen/land-fordert-die-digitalitat-der-wissenschaftlichen-bibliotheken-mit-7-millionen-euro-225277.html