Speakers
Description
The openCost project is developing a technical infrastructure that will make publication costs freely accessible via interfaces and formats. In the context of the open access transformation, this will enable greater cost transparency.
Due to its research profile (medicine and STEM subjects), Ulm University's publication output has largely been converted to a publication-based logic, and researchers are therefore dependent on extensive OA funding opportunities. The supply situation at the university in OA transformation agreements (publish-and-read models) is currently good and enables an open access share of 75%
In particular, Ulm University benefits from the developed openCost schema, as the issue of cost transparency has gained importance in the course of the OA transformation. For this purpose, a crosswalk for a metadata (sub)set following the openCost standard was implemented in our live DSpace instance and linked to the relevant collections. As a result, the following metadata (DOI, ROR, publication type, cost information, and funding year) are now transferred to the OAI-PMH interface, enabling machine-readable access.
To this end, the existing metadata fields were supplemented with fields for cost information and the funding year, and a filter function was added to limit the export to funded publications.
The main aim was to have current and automatically updated cost information linked to our local Electronic Journal Library (EZB) records, offered by OpenAPC. This results in increased efficiency in our internal workflows and, at the same time, ensures seamless exchange of cost information between relevant information systems.
Our code represents an initial, prototypical implementation that maps DSpace’s internal metadata schema to a minimal openCost implementation. It serves as a starting point for further development and will be gradually expanded in future versions to include additional functions, such as the display of individual transformation contracts.
Simon Eiberger, Dr. Jonas Mirbeth, kiz/Ulm University
simon.eiberger@uni-ulm.de
jonas.mirbeth@uni-ulm.de
November 3, 2025
| Choose a theme for your abstract: | Cost transparency in scientific publishing |
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