The openCost project was launched by the project partners Bielefeld University Library, the German Electron Synchrotron DESY (Hamburg) and Regensburg University Library.

University Library of Regensburg

The University Library of Regensburg has been operating the Electronic Journals Library (EZB) since 1997, which it established and continuously developed. Nearly all academic libraries in Germany participate in the EZB, and it is also well represented in Austria and Switzerland.

In October 2018, the University Library of Regensburg successfully completed a DFG project to establish Open Access services for the Electronic Journals Library.

Bielefeld University Library

Bielefeld University Library has been operating the OpenAPC infrastructure since 2014. Currently, over 260 academic institutions and research funders contribute with regular data deliveries.

OpenAPC currently tracks costs of over 207 million euros for more than 104,000 OA journal articles. This makes openAPC the largest collection of cost data on open access journal articles.

German Electron Synchrotron DESY

In 2010, the library of the German Electron Synchrotron DESY began building a shared repository solution. This resulted in the JOIN² consortium with currently nine partner institutions.

DESY itself operates ‘PUBDB’, a JOIN² instance for the verification of its own publications as an open access repository as well as a library system.

Team

Project partner: Picture of the project team standing on the steps of a staircase
Project team openCost (f.l.t.r.): Julia Bartlewski, Dirk Pieper, Gernot Deinzer, Colin Sippl, Christoph Broschinski, Alexander Wagner, Bianca Schweighofer (absent: Cornelia Lang, Lisa-Marie Stein, Silke Weisheit)