The public part of the progress report for the DFG-project “openCost: Standardized Delivery and Open Provision of Publication Costs and Publisher Agreements” has been published. Covering the reporting period from February 2022 to May 2024, the report provides a comprehensive overview of the project’s achievements.
The progress report is available here.
Abstract
Within the scope of openCost we are creating a technical infrastructure that allows us to comprehensively record all costs involved in scientific publishing and subsequently make them freely accessible by means of standardized interfaces. This will enable cost transparency on an institutional, national, and international level.
Therefore, with the support of (inter-)national experts, we have developed a standardized metadata schema to record, retrieve and map all publication costs of a scientific institution in a structured form. The basic OpenAPC metadata schema was extended to the openCost metadata schema to be able to map additional costs associated with Open Access publication fees. The data is exchanged via an OAI-PMH interface. OpenAPC acts as a service provider for openCost, while the project partners and several JOIN² institutions are data providers.
Another focus of the project is the extension of the Electronic Journals Library (EZB) to include functions regarding publication costs. To achieve this, we integrate the OpenAPC interface into the EZB to display summarized cost information. Additionally, we are extending the EZB so that institutions may enter information on publication funding for specific journals as well as institution-specific agreements in the EZB administration interface. Thus, all participating institutions can use the EZB as a central platform for distributing and communicating this OA information to researchers.