OpenAPC - A contribution to transparency in fee-based Open Access publishing

Christoph Broschinski
2016 Zenodo  
With the ongoing transition to Open Access publishing, the topic of Article Processing Charges (APCs) becomes more and more prevalent, as publication fees on article basis are slowly but constantly transforming and replacing the traditional methods of subscription-based access to scientific publications for involved institutions and libraries. However, as with established models, cost intransparencies have also remained an issue with APCs, making comparisons and evaluations difficult and posing
more » ... a severe problem for institutional negotiators and policy makers. Following the implementation of Open Access Publishing Fonds in Germany by the German Research Foundation (DFG), the OpenAPC initiative was established at Bielefeld University Library in 2014 with the support of the DINI Working Group Electronic Publishing. OpenAPC approached universities with DFG-funded Publication Fonds and several of them agreed to share their APC expenditures, applying an Open Data approach to Article Processing Charges. To make the process of data collection, processing and presentation as transparent and reproducible as possible, a GitHub repository was created as central working platform (https://github.com/OpenAPC/openapc-de). In October 2015 OpenAPC teamed up with the ESAC initiative (Max Planck Digital Library) and the OA Analytics Group (I²SoS, Bielefeld University) to form the DFG-funded project INTACT (http://intact-project.org/). With a constantly growing set of participating institutions, OpenAPC now holds data from 35 institutions both national and international, ranging from small universities over research centers up to large science funders like the FWF or the Wellcome Trust. At the moment, OpenAPC manages a dataset of over 14300 articles, with APC costs summarizing to more than 25 million Euro. This presentation will give an overview over the OpenAPC project and its recent activities. We will introduce our GitHub repository and show how distinctive GitHub features (Pull Requests, Revisions, Flavored Markdown...) can be ut [...]
doi:10.5281/zenodo.4063599 fatcat:voypidhennee5bnsw65lknojbe