For many years now DESY Library is supporting its authors during the publication process. Besides answering questions e.g. on copyright or formal procedures, we also assist our authors in a very practical way: the handling of publication charges and thus relieving them from complex and diverse payment systems and international billing requirements. As the scientific publishing landscape is (finally) on the road to full Open Access, payments change from subscription fees to publishing fees with a host of new business models and contracts. This makes this service ever more important.

Additionally, amongst the lessons learned from the Serials Crisis, it is general consensus to make all fees as transparent as possible including not only the amount, but also the type of costs involved. This triggered already back in 2016 the implementation of the so called APC module in JOIN². 1Deinzer, G. ; Wagner, A. ; Broschinski, C. ; Pieper, D.: Including Open Access Information In Institutional Repositories. CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholary Communication, OAI10, Geneva, Switzerland, 21 Jun 2017 – 23 Jun 2017 10.3204/PUBDB-2017-05961 2Wagner, A. ; APC-Verwaltung im institutionellen Repositorium. GMS Medizin, Bibliothek, Information 18(3), Doc21 (2018) 10.3205/mbi000422 (in German). 3Wagner, A. ; JOIN2 Collaboration. Article Processing Charges and OpenAPC. 4th Invenio User Group Workshop, IUGW2017, Garching, Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Zentrum, Germany, 21 Mar 2017 – 24 Mar 2017. 10.3204/PUBDB-2017-01358.

Once the technical foundation was laid DESY library started collecting all known costs together with the publications in pubdb. Previously, these were only visible to users logged in to pubdb and for internal evaluations.

This has now changed. DESY is finally delivering its cost data like almost 400 other institutions to the internationally renowned OpenAPC initiative. While we were one of the early adopters of APC management, our participation in this case was delayed by a more mundane reason: Up till now, it was necessary to send in cost data manually by email prepared as specially formatted csv files. A time consuming procedure.

As a proof of concept for the DFG project openCost, however, DESY Library was now able to establish an entirely automatic data harvesting directly from pubdb. Furthermore, due to DESY’s participation in the JOIN² collaboration all partners will soon be able to join OpenAPC. A break down on publishing costs is visualized as treemaps. With RWTH Aachen being the first of our JOIN² partners having already done so.

We are now focussing on the implementation of the first proposed openCost data formats. Those will allow to transport also cost data beyond the pure Open Access costs, like page, colour or cover charges. At OpenAPC, however, this also requires some extensions currently in progress.

  • 1
    Deinzer, G. ; Wagner, A. ; Broschinski, C. ; Pieper, D.: Including Open Access Information In Institutional Repositories. CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholary Communication, OAI10, Geneva, Switzerland, 21 Jun 2017 – 23 Jun 2017 10.3204/PUBDB-2017-05961
  • 2
    Wagner, A. ; APC-Verwaltung im institutionellen Repositorium. GMS Medizin, Bibliothek, Information 18(3), Doc21 (2018) 10.3205/mbi000422 (in German).
  • 3
    Wagner, A. ; JOIN2 Collaboration. Article Processing Charges and OpenAPC. 4th Invenio User Group Workshop, IUGW2017, Garching, Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Zentrum, Germany, 21 Mar 2017 – 24 Mar 2017. 10.3204/PUBDB-2017-01358.