The opencostid is a unique, machine-readable identifier for contracts and business models in the field of scholarly publishing. It enables agreements to be uniquely identified and linked to the participating institutions and the journals involved. In this way, the opencostid creates greater transparency and facilitates analysis, monitoring, and data exchange between systems.

It complements existing services such as the ESAC Registry by mapping not only information on transformative agreements but as well on other business models such as memberships or Subscribe-to-Open. The goal is to provide a representation of the current contractual landscape as comprehensive and as practical as possible.

The opencostid registry is managed within the context of the Electronic Journals Library (EZB), but is independent of EZB membership and is available worldwide free of charge.

An overview of all opencostids already assigned can be found here.

If an opencostid has not yet been assigned to an agreement, you will be able to submit missing ones to the openCost registry as a logged in user: Note 'Login' / 'Manage deposits' in the user menu at the top of the page, there you get more information on the submission.

Register as a user here. Once you have submitted an agreement for review, our editorial team will check the entries and automatically assign new opencostids.