DFG funding: 380,000 euros for university publication fund

Since 2013, the university library has operated a publication fund for the university that promotes the worldwide free availability of first publications of scientific publications. From this fund, authors of the university are reimbursed for article fees for publications in so-called gold open access journals and, on a pro-rata basis since summer 2021, also for publication fees for open access monographs. In addition, there is the possibility to publish in hybrid subscription journals free of charge in open access via the national DEAL contracts and further OA transformation contracts.

The publication fund is supplemented with funds from the library budget. The financial plan is to provide a total of 250,000 euros annually for OA funding. Not only the funding of publications, but also the transparency of the costs of scientific publications is to be promoted by the new program and a corresponding administrative infrastructure is to be established. This is intended to record the number, costs and funding contexts of publications by Kassel scientists and make centrally and decentrally incurred costs more transparent.

 "The once again successful DFG application for OA publication funding puts us in a position to continue on the path to open access to scientific publications, which we have been pursuing since 2005 with our OA policy," emphasizes Dr. Oliver Fromm, Chancellor of the University of Kassel.

Dr. Tobias Pohlmann, the university's OA officer, explains the incentive and opportunity: "The continuous funding from the DFG gives us financial and content-related support in the complex and sometimes disparate change in the publication culture. It also enables us to address humanities and social science disciplines, which predominantly publish monographs, even more strongly."

Background

The University of Kassel has been committed to Open Access for almost twenty years and has been continuously expanding its offerings in this regard ever since. In November 2005, it became the second university in Germany to adopt an OA policy, the original version of which called for secondary publications on the university's publication server (Green OA). In 2006, the new publication server KOBRA (Kassel Online Library, Repository and Archive), which was DINI-certified the following year and is still in operation today, was set up. In the following year, the position of an OA officer was established at the University Library (UB). In addition to managing the fund and providing services related to OA, she participates in the DEAL contracts with Wiley and Springer Nature, as well as other transformation contracts. Authors also have the opportunity to make first and second publications available in OA on the university's own publication server KOBRA or research data in the data repository DaKS.

Further information:

https://www.uni-kassel.de/ub/publizieren

Contact:

Claudia Martin-Konle
Kassel University Library
Senior Library Director
Tel.: +49 561 804-2117
E-mail: direktion[at]bibliothek.uni-kassel[dot]de

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Dr. Tobias Pohlmann
Kassel University Library
Open Access Officer
Tel.: +49 561 804-2529
E-mail: pohlmann[at]bibliothek.uni-kassel[dot]de