An introduction to the opencostid

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 also on other business models such as memberships or Subscribe-to-Open. The goal is to provide as comprehensive and practical a representation of the current contractual landscape as possible.

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

Integration with the EZB

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.

Requesting an opencostid

The service is currently still under development. Soon, it will be possible to request new opencostids via https://www.opencost.de/registry.