The ZBW engages for Open Access Transformation in economics – nationally and internationally.
The ZBW pursues various approaches and projects, thus contributing to more diversity in the publishing market. The ZBW puts a special focus on enabling Diamond Open Access and supporting non-commercial infrastructures.
The ZBW thus fulfills central demands of current science policy.
The ZBW regards the paper of the German Council of Science and Humanities and the Action Plan Diamond Open Access of Science Europe as fundamental.
In which areas is the ZBW actively engaged for Open Access to publicly funded research?
Agreements with publishers
The ZBW actively negotiates with academic publishers. The goal is to jointly develop new models for a sustainable Open Access Transformation. The ZBW Consortium negotiates national licence agreements with large publishers which include an Open Access component. These are also known as “Publish & Read” agreements.
The ZBW also negotiates with small and medium-sized publishers for the Open Access Transformation of individual journals or relevant monograph series relevant for the economics community. In cooperation with selected publishers, the ZBW pilots the model “Subscribe to Open”. for economics journals. The ZBW also supports the Open Access Transformation of selected scholarly monograph series.
Scholar-led Open Access
With Open Library Economics the ZBW supports so-called scholar-led Open Access.
Scholarly journals can be taken over by the science community.
This means that the rights to the title and therefore the decision-making authority lie with members of the scientific community (e.g. editorial board, scholarly society).
As part of the Open Library Economics programme, the ZBW publishes annual calls for tenders to which scientific editors can submit offers. They receive transitional funding for converting their journal to scholar-led Open Access. If required, journals can switch to an non-commercial publisher. The team of Open Library Economics advises the journal’s editors during the conversion process. The ZBW is building a funding consortium for sustainable funding.
Open Access infrastructures
The ZBW operates its own Open Access infrastructures. The disciplinary publication server EconStor offers a home for publications in economics. For the publication of research data the ZBW operates the Open Data service Journal Data Archive. In addition, the ZBW supports essential, non-commercial Open Access infrastructures for the scientific community.
