DeepGreen – Open Access Transformation

Within the scope of the alliance licenses, thus the Germany-wide license contracts for electronic resources concluded with the support of the German Research Foundation (DFG), negotiations are also taking place concerning rights for the so-called green open access. This means that authors of the participating institutions are entitled to post their articles released in the licensed journals in an institutional or subject-specific repository of their own choice in the published form, and to make them freely accessible after a preferably short time.

Currently, authors make use of this option only rarely. This is the starting point of the DFG-funded project DeepGreen: A central "data hub" will collect all articles bearing negotiated open access rights from the publishing houses with their support, and provide the various repositories with their respective content share. In this manner, publishing houses can save the effort of individual checks, authors no longer need to familiarise themselves with their rights and claim them proactively, and repositories can expand their holdings by adding open access titles.

In addition to the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Department Acquisition, Collection Development and Cataloguing 2; Head Office of the Bavarian Library Network), the project partners are the Cooperative Library Association Berlin-Brandenburg (KOBV; project management), the University Library of the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, the University Library of the Technische Universität Berlin and the Helmholtz Open Science Coordination Office at the German Research Center for Geosciences in Potsdam.

Running since 1 January 2016, the project DeepGreen holds a number of challenges in store. Publishing houses need to be won over for cooperation, and it needs to be identified in the publishers’ databases which authors belong to the institutions bearing the licenses in question. The delivered data need to be standardised and a technical concept needs to be developed for the data hub. The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has assumed the central task of communicating with publishing houses, in particular. The publishers Karger and Sage could be won over for DeepGreen already before the start of the project. Negotiations are in progress with further publishing houses. The data hub itself is developed mainly in Berlin at the KOBV, with a prototype being scheduled for September 2016.

More worth knowing about the project:
https://deepgreen.kobv.de
or see the Twitter account @oa_deepgreen