openCost at the 112th BiblioCon2024

The 112th BiblioCon2024, which has the motto “open.local.global.”, will take place in Hamburg from June 4 to 7, 2024. This year, the openCost project will participate in the BiblioCon2024 program with two presentations and a hands-on lab.

The openCost project forms a concrete building block for implementing the concept of a comprehensive information budget in practice. The metadata schema defines cost types and how they are recorded. It represents an exchange format that can be integrated into the infrastructure of an institution and at the same time enables the exchange of data between any instances. openCost achieves cost transparency as a strategic contribution to the collective Open Science movement. Each cost type of a scientific publication should be documented in a standardized way. The open provision of costs and publishing agreements improves cost transparency within an institution and allows inter-institutional comparisons. In this way, academics and publishers can (re)gain the necessary cost control, question publishing conditions, form informed opinions, exert influence and take responsibility.

openCost wants to contribute to making the OA transformation financially sustainable and fair, which can ultimately only be achieved through transparency. The lecture will present news, current developments and future prospects. Following the finalization of the scheme for article-based fees, which has also undergone technical optimizations, the scheme for contract-based costs also went into the community vote. The feedback received is presented here. From now on, the aim is to map the alphabet of publication costs: Because these are not only often non-transparent, but also diverse. They range from “Article”, “Book”, “Chapter” or “Data Processing Charges” to “Electronic Publishing Contracts”. Finally, the connection potential of openCosts and the resulting simplification of work for scientific institutions will be discussed. In addition to a potential integration into the DataCite schema, data aggregation through OpenAPC and an alignment with openCost standards of the DFG monitoring “OA Publication Funding” should be mentioned, for example.

The Electronic Journals Library (EZB) offers fast, structured and standardized access to scientific full-text journals. It is networked with many digital services of other libraries and information facilities. As part of the DFG-funded openCost project, the EZB will be expanded to provide researchers and authors with information on open access publication costs and their specific funding conditions and subsidies at their own institution. In future, authors will be able to obtain details on funding conditions via the EZB and estimate the expected publication costs.

In addition, employees of libraries and research institutions can benefit by being able to provide or query information on publication cost funding, memberships or participation in transformation contracts, such as the DEAL contracts, via the EZB. The EZB will make this information available for subsequent use via data exports and new interfaces.

To implement these innovations, the EZB user interface and parts of the EZB administration will be expanded. There will also be a link to the OpenAPC cost aggregation service. Participating institutions can use the EZB administration to maintain information on the assumption of publication costs and release the applicable funding conditions, cost information and memberships for various journals for display. Both generally applicable and institution-specific information on publishing is then displayed in a user-friendly way on the EZB journal details page and made available via interfaces. A workshop with over 100 participants was held to revise the journal detail page. The suggestions and feedback we gathered there have been integrated into the revision of the new EZB journal detail pages.

The Hands-on Lab offers practical insights and an open exchange for publication cost administrators. The focus is on the effective handling of publication fees in scientific institutions as a contribution to the sustainable establishment of an information budget.

We invite you to look over each other’s shoulders as we demonstrate individual workflows and meet collective challenges. They all share the overarching goal of optimizing structures and making structural adjustments in order to enable central cost monitoring in support of the OA transformation and to come closer step by step to the conceptual implementation of an information budget. The goal of cost transparency is no coincidence: scientific publishing and the associated costs are a complex undertaking. In the jungle of cost models, publishing agreements and terminology, we will lay our cards on the table and look at concrete case studies together using invoices.

Participants are invited to contribute ideas, arguments, everyday reports, sample calculations or similar materials. While sifting through heterogeneous internal processes, we will come across homogeneous problems and questions. Topics such as internal communication or the cost management department are just some of the aspects that can be addressed in order to learn from each other and develop best practices. Other topics can be terminology, cost splitting, currency conversions, data deliveries to funding bodies or OpenAPC. The experience of the research centers and universities associated with the openCost project will be incorporated into the Hands-on Lab. We want to carry out practical exercises using the repositories of DESY and the University of Regensburg. We will also simulate the processes from invoice receipt to documentation in a cost module and invoice payment with central processes.