Open Access publication costs / 2025-2027 / University of Duisburg-Essen

• Applicant: Nicole Walger
• Subject Area: Education Systems and Educational Institutions
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 491478386

With more than 40,000 students, over 4,000 academic staff and 520 professors, the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) is one of the largest universities in Germany. In its mission statement “Open-minded”, it is committed to the principle of openness in addition to high-level research, innovation, internationality, interdisciplinarity, equal opportunities and diversity. With well over 6,000 publications per year, it is one of thestrongly publishing scientific institutions in Germany. Worldwide unrestricted and permanent access to scientific information is achieved through the principle of Open Access (OA) in the sense of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, to which UDE has been a signatory since 2014. On the basis of its OA policy, the UDE calls on its members to make their research results available free of charge worldwide and for various uses. Together with its university library, it is involved in numerous activities with respect to the OA transformation of the academic publication system and is systematically evaluating various emerging business models in cooperation with various stakeholders. Against the background of the continuing risk of oligopoly formation by the major academic publishers, the UDE places particular emphasis on maintaining the diversity of offerings and thus the cost negotiation options on the publication market. It sees it as a central task of the ongoing OA transformation to be able to identify the actual costs incurred for the publishing services provided on the basis of full cost accounting and to ensure that the available funds are used economically and sustainably. It sees the introduction of an information budget as an essential basis for this task.

• DFG Programme: Science Communication, Research Data, eResearch (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)