What are Open Access infrastructures?
Open Access infrastructures are understood to mean tools and services around Open Access publications. Open Access infrastructures are not only repositories as text storages for scholarly publications. Open Access infrastructures include all services (and software) which enable the collecting, storing, organising, accessing, sharing, and evaluating of open research outputs.
Many of these infrastructures have been developed by academia itself and are operated by science organisations in public institutions.
Why does the ZBW engage for this topic?
Science policy sees scholar-led infrastructures as an important and necessary element of a federated and diverse publishing system and thus as a contribution to more biblio-diversity. This is manifest in the SPARC Europe Report “Scoping the Open Science Infrastructure Landscape in Europe” or the paper of the German Council of Science and Humanities on Open Access Transformation.
The ZBW sees itself as an information infrastructure and therefore actively engages in the context of Open Access infrastructures.
What does the ZBW’s engagement look like?
The ZBW operates several infrastructures in the context of Open Access. It hosts the repository EconStor for Open Access publications in economics. It also hosts the Open Access “Journal of Comments and Replications in Economics” (JCRE) and maintains webpages for its Open Access journals Wirtschaftsdienst and Intereconomics. With the project “Open Library Economics” it supports non-commercial scholar-led journals.
In addition, the ZBW co-finances external scholar-led infrastructures if they are relevant to the ZBW’s work. These are:
| Infrastructure | Relevance to the ZBW? |
|---|---|
| DOAB/ OAPEN | Important source for EconStor and ZBW collection management for identifying Open Access monographs. |
| DOAJ | Important source for EconStor and ZBW collection management for identifying Open Access journals. |
| LeibnizOpen | Central Open Access portal of the Leibniz Association. The ZBW supplies the Open Access publications of 13 institutes from Section B through EconStor. |
| RePEc | Dissemination tool for EconStor / data source for EconBiz. |
| Sherpa/Romeo | Important source for identifying secondary usage rights. |
| DSpace | Software basis for EconStor and ZBW Publication Archive. |
| Open Knowledge Maps | Tool for visualising publication-based metadata (based e.g. on EconBiz or EconStor). |
| OA Switchboard | Service for the standardised exchange of publication-related metadata - is being co-financed by the ZBW together with the TIB and the ZB MED for a two-year pilot phase for use in universities and research institutions throughout Germany. |
