From October 5 to 7, the international expert workshop “openCost: the road to publication cost transparency” took place at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron in Hamburg. There the project partners DESY, UB Bielefeld and UB Regensburg presented first project results. The workshop also served as a platform for knowledge exchange between national and international experts. Speakers from eight different countries contributed their perspectives.
First day: Introduction and knowledge exchange with experts
On the first day of the workshop, the project partners introduced themselves in the block “The openCost Project” and addressed their respective roles in the project. Afterwards, Bernhard Mittermaier, Head of the Central Library at Forschungszentrum Jülich, gave a keynote on the topic of “Information Budget”. He provided important impulses for the workshop. In the thematic block “Knowledge exchange between national and international experts”, experts from the California Digital Library and Sikt (Norway) reported on their experiences with publication costs and cost recording.
Second day: Knowledge exchange and interactive hands-on labs
The second day of the workshop continued from this point. International and national experts from Jisc, AT2OA2, the National Library of Finland and the DFG project Transform2Open contributed their respective perspectives on publication costs. Afterwards, the 40 participants had the opportunity to work together on a metadata schema in various hands-on labs.
In the hands-on lab “Metadata schema”, participants discussed the current internal proposal for a metadata schema. The participants provided fruitful suggestions. The hands-on lab “Terminology” was dedicated to clear, unambiguous definitions of terms to describe cost data. And the third hands-on lab dealt with the consideration of payments that cannot be clearly assigned to a publication. In particular, the participants addressed publishing agreements, cost sharing, and articles without DOI. Finally, the day ended after two more presentations from the last thematic block, “New Services and Subsequent Use.” Experts from the Electronic Journals Library (EZB) and Unsub/OpenAlex reported on how openCost data could be used in other services in the future.
Third Day: Wrap-up and subsequent use
On the last day of the workshop, the lab results from the previous day were summarized for all participants and lively discussed. These results will serve as a starting point to enhance and fine tune the project team’s current internal metadata schema. Afterwards, experts from the Open Access Monitor and OA Switchboard rounded off the workshop with two more interesting presentations from the block “New Services and Subsequent Use”.
The expert workshop summarizes the desiderata of the individual participants and the committees they represent. The results of the workshop are now being processed and will be incorporated into the metadata schema. This schema will be put up for discussion in December. All contributions from the workshop are available on the event page. The openCost team will also publish conference proceedings.
