At this year’s Open Access Days, Colin Sippl (UB Regensburg) presented the new functions of the Electronic Journals Library (EZB), which will be added to it as part of openCost. His poster contribution was awarded the prize in the category “learned most” (Poster at Zenodo).

Poster about new functions of the EZB

The poster provides an overview of the new features, data and information on publication costs that will be added to the ECB as part of openCost. These new features include both EZB data and external information. The aim is to provide EZB users with both institution-independent and institution-specific information on the assumption of publication costs and to create more cost transparency. To this end, journals in the EZB are enriched with additional information and awarded new categories. Examples of this are „Indexed in DOAJ” or “Mirror Journal”, whereby established sources such as the title list of the Mirror Journal Working Group or the DOAJ are used for this purpose. Journal categories for which there is no data source, on the other hand, are assigned manually in the EZB and then made available for reuse, such as „Subscribe to Open-Journals.”

In addition to the labeling of journals, centrally maintained title lists in the EZB, so-called EZB collections that are part of transformative agreements, will be labeled and linked to the associated ESAC ID. Furthermore, cost information for selected pilot libraries will be retrieved from OpenAPC at a later date and integrated into the EZB user interface. This will provide users with cost information about a journal, such as the average APCs of a journal, as additional information in the EZB detail page.

Finally, an input facility is to be created for ECB institutions to store individual agreements with publishers, such as memberships. This information is to be displayed in the ECB on an institution-specific basis for the individual journals and made available for further use.