From March 17 to 19, 2026, the openCost project team will host the international conference “openCost: Navigating Cost Transparency” at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY in Hamburg, to which all interested parties are cordially invited.

The conference will focus on insights into the second phase of the openCost project and joint discussions on ways to achieve cost transparency in scientific publishing.

Initial results on the development of an internal metadata schema for cost recording, the expansion of the exchange format, and application scenarios in the Electronic Journals Library (EZB) and repositories will be presented and discussed. Questions of technical implementation, data integration, and process design will also be addressed, with a particular focus on the further development of the openCost standard, institutional use cases, and the networking of open science infrastructures to promote cost transparency.

The aim is to jointly set the agenda for the second phase of the project, to bring together practical perspectives from the community, and to create space for networking and exchange.

Call for Posters

As part of the conference, we are planning an interactive poster session with short presentations to showcase projects, initiatives, and institutional use cases. Interested parties are invited to submit poster proposals.

We particularly welcome contributions on the following topics:

  • Cost transparency in scientific publishing
  • Sustainable financing and budgeting of open access infrastructures
  • Cost transparency in diamond open access
  • Internal workflows for processing transformative agreements
  • Diversity of publication objects and their cost recording
  • Technical and organizational workflows in dealing with publication costs
  • Open access projects related to cost and budget issues
  • Publication costs as FAIR research data

We look forward to receiving poster proposals in the form of abstracts (max. 300 words) by October 31, 2025, via our conference tool Indico. The conference language is English.

Further information about the conference, the program, and registration will follow shortly.
We look forward to your contributions and to sharing ideas with you in Hamburg!