The role of scientific libraries in the Open Access transformation in Germany

Kurzfassung/Abstract

Today, no one can imagine a scientific library in Germany without Open Access (OA) books and journals. This kind of success is only possible because nowadays there is a dedicated group of professionals working on optimising OA strategies in most libraries in Germany, so that scientific research and results stay accessible for everyone. This presentation investigates the role of German scientific libraries in the OA transformation in the last five years based on selected examples.
Since the beginning of the OA revolution, libraries and publishers have been able to create new business models and establish new services. As a result, OA offers many different ways of publishing (e.g., Gold, Green, Diamond, etc.), and this diversity seems to be growing steadily. The abundance of business models can cause a lot of misunderstanding and difficulties for many researchers and students. Scientific libraries try to help with these uncertainties by providing their researchers with repositories for publications, supporting them in the publication process and in handling research data. It is exactly this library staff, who are the driving force behind the Open Access and Open Science transformation movement.
As data from the German Library Statistics (Hochschulbibliothekszentrum des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen [hbz], 2022) or in German Deutsche Bibliotheksstatistik, shows, between 2017 and 2021 spending by scientific libraries in Germany related to OA publications (all costs from OA (Article Processing Charges, Book Processing Charges, OA memberships, etc.) has more than tripled. The number of Green and Gold OA publications made available by these institutions' own repositories has also increased by more than 30% during this time. The German Library Statistics contains all important data on German libraries and documents their work on a national level. The data includes under other things loans, personal, budget, etc.
Our presentation will briefly introduce the history of OA in Germany and what scientific libraries accomplished to make the concept successful, e.g., like institutional repositories, university publishing or providing workshops and support within the publication process. Furthermore, we will provide various graphs and illustrations based on the data from the German Library Statistics and Open Access Monitor (Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, 2022) in the years 2017 - 2021, to demonstrate the growing supply of OA literature provided by scientific libraries in Germany and give an overview of the current state. We will also summarise up to date information from various journals on library and information science, from the websites Open Access Monitor and Open Access Network (Göttingen State and University Library [SUB Göttingen], 2022). Furthermore, our group will illustrate the work German libraries put in the Open Access Transformation using information from the websites of these libraries and transform it to graphs and illustrations. Although the OA transformation began in Germany ten years ago in 2012, this presentation will only examine the events from the last five years, 2017 until today