The TU9 – an alliance of technical universities in Germany – published the position paper Diamond & fair (in German) on 21 March 2023 in o-bib. Das offene Bibliotheksjournal. In the document, the institutions formulate five recommendations for the expansion of the publication infrastructure for books in diamond open access in accordance with the Fair Open Access Principles. The TU9 Libraries would like to encourage academic libraries and infrastructure institutions to consider and implement these recommendations for their own institutions.
Recommendations for strengthening the Diamond Open Access ecosystem
The position paper lists measures in the fields of strategies and policies, funding, consulting, repositories and cooperative infrastructures: these are intended to promote the expansion of publicly supported and scholar-led publication infrastructures for OA books. Among other things, the TU9 recommend that academic institutions include OA books in their OA strategies and realign their own publication services, publication infrastructures and publication funds accordingly. In addition, the funding for OA books should include a fixed budget for the support of diamond open access publishers through OA publication funds that should be gradually increased. At the same time, differentiated production costs for books in science-owned OA publishing infrastructures should be eligible for funding through local publication funds. Advice on publishing OA books should be offered and expanded at all libraries. Repositories should be systematically understood as high-quality publishing infrastructures for OA books and expanded according to the latest standards. Libraries and other infrastructure institutions should examine whether their own e-publishing platforms for OA books can be hosted or whether alternatively infrastructures can be offered cooperatively with partners and distributed competences. According to the position paper, the aforementioned recommendations for action strengthen the diamond open access ecosystem and are in line with the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access as well as the "Empfehlungen zur Transformation des wissenschaftlichen Publizierens zu Open Access" of the German Science and Humanities Council.
The following link leads to the TU9 position paper Diamond & fair (in German): https://doi.org/10.5282/o-bib/5926