DFG continues to fund Kassel Open Access publications

Since 2013, the University Library has been operating a publication fund for the university, which promotes the worldwide free availability of first publications of scientific publications. This fund is used to reimburse the university's authors for article fees for publications in Gold Open Access journals and, since summer 2021, publication fees for Open Access monographs. In addition, it is also possible to publish free of charge in open access in hybrid subscription journals via the national DEAL contracts and other OA transformation contracts.

The publication fund is supplemented with funds from the library budget. The financial planning provides for a total of 250,000 euros to be made available annually for OA funding. Not only the publications themselves, but also the transparency of the costs of scientific publications is to be promoted by the new program and a corresponding administrative infrastructure is to be established. This will record the number, costs and funding contexts of publications by Kassel researchers and make centrally and decentrally incurred costs more transparent.

"The once again successful DFG application for Open Access publication funding puts us in a position to continue on the path to free access to scientific publications, which we have been pursuing since 2005 with our OA policy," emphasizes Dr. Oliver Fromm, Chancellor of the University of Kassel. The library is assigned to the Chancellor's department within the Presidential Board.

Dr. Tobias Pohlmann, OA Officer at the University, explains the incentive and opportunity: "The continuous funding from the DFG gives us financial and content-related support in the complex and sometimes disparate change in publication culture. It also enables us to address humanities and social science disciplines, which predominantly publish monographs, even more strongly."

Background

The University of Kassel has been committed to Open Access for almost twenty years and has been continuously expanding its services in this area ever since. In November 2005, it was the second university in Germany to adopt an OA policy, the original version of which called for secondary publications on the university's publication server (Green OA). In 2006, the new publication server KOBRA (Kassel Online Library, Repository and Archive), which was DINI-certified the following year and is still in operation today, was set up. In the following year, the position of an OA officer was established at the University Library (UB). In addition to looking after the fund and the range of services relating to Open Access, she is involved in the DEAL contracts with Wiley, Springer Nature and Elsevier as well as other transformation contracts. Authors also have the opportunity to make first and second publications available in open access on the university's own publication server KOBRA or research data in the data repository DaKS.

Further information: https://www.uni-kassel.de/ub/publizieren

Contact:

Claudia Martin-Konle
Kassel University Library
Senior Library Director
Phone: +49 561 804-2117
Email: direktion[at]bibliothek.uni-kassel[dot]de

Dr. Tobias Pohlmann
Kassel University Library
Open Access Officer
Phone: +49 561 804-2529
E-mail: pohlmann[at]bibliothek.uni-kassel[dot]de