Finally! After a year of intensive work, the openCost team presents a draft for a metadata format for fee-based, individual articles. A common use case would be articles in Gold Open Access journals funded by APCs. However, this schema already includes the coverage of cost items beyond Open Access fees. Next steps will tackle transformative agreements and memberships.
The aim of the project is to create a technical infrastructure that makes publication costs freely accessible via standardized interfaces and formats. In a first step, the openCost team has developed a metadata schema in collaboration with (inter)national experts for which it proposes an xml-representation that is particularly suitable for exchange via OAI-PMH. The metadata schema attempts to consider all costs related to publication („total cost of publishing”). This includes Open Access and non-Open-Access costs as well as costs for processing fees (e. g. costs for bank transfer, credit cards etc.). The intended goal is to provide an overview over all payments to publishing houses made by an institution (the so-called information budget). In addition, the standardized, machine-readable format enables easy exchange of cost data worldwide.
Feedback for published metadata schema
To further improve the published metadata schema, the openCost team is inviting feedback from the community and making the schema available as a “Request for Comments” (RFC) document. OpenCost is asking for suggestions and comments by 31.3.2023 via GitHub issue or via email. After the end of the first comment period, all incoming suggestions will be discussed by the openCost team and, where required, incorporated into the metadata schema. If you have any questions about the correct application of the scheme, please feel free to contact us by e-mail. Please send us a sample invoice for this purpose.
The openCost team invites you to participate in the development of the metadata schema and is looking forward to a constructive discussion!
The published metadata schema is available via the openCost GitHub repository.