ZBW believes in openness as a core value in organisational culture

Kiel/Hamburg, 19th November 2020: ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics publishes key issues paper Openness as area of action for the ZBW. Open Science agent ZBW puts openness and thus the core values of transparency, reusability and collaboration at the centre of its organisational culture.

The ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics positions itself as an Open Science partner for economic researchers. Numerous ZBW services support open, transparent and reproducible research and publishing processes in economics. The ZBW advocates the idea of Open Science at several levels: it carries out research in the field of Open Science, is active in science policy to implement Open Science at the national and international level, and develops new infrastructures to facilitate access and remove barriers.

The ZBW promotes an in-house culture of open access to its own working results and open collaboration. In order to develop this culture and to embed it deeply in the working practices of the ZBW, it started a broadly-based participatory dialogue in 2019. The result is documented in the key issues paper “Openness as an area of action for the ZBW”. This provides an operational framework for the next years to embed openness even more strongly as the guiding principle for working practices at the ZBW.

ZBW director Professor Klaus Tochtermann says: “With this key issues paper we combine goals and areas of action to establish the basic principles of open working in many working areas of the ZBW. The paper also makes clear which of our working results we offer openly for reuse. This includes publications in Open Access, open data, open source code and open educational resources created at the ZBW.”

Detailed interview with Professor Klaus Tochtermann about origin and background of the paper