On September 15th, Germany, as an OpenAIRE partner, teamed up with the organizers of the Open Access Tage 2020 at Bielefeld University for the national workshop on OpenAIRE initiatives and the EOSC. Due to the pandemic, the Open Access Tage 2020 was transferred to the digital world under the perfect organization of the team from Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences and Bielefeld University Library. Speakers at the event were Ilaria Fava and Najko Jahn (University of Göttingen), Andreas Czern...

A new open access project called OLH-DE has launched at the University of Konstanz. Started March 2018 and funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the project seeks to further promote the Open Library of Humanities (OLH) in Germany. The OLH is an England-based scholarly-led non-profit organisation for publishing open access journals from all over the humanities. It is funded by an international library consortium of about 250 members paying a small fee each to finance the more ...

Last year, German Parliament passed a controversial copyright reform bill known as UrhWissG (Gesetz zum Urheberrecht für die Wissenschaft) which came into effect in March 2018 and will be subject to review after a 5-year period. The review had become necessary over concerns that major changes in the academic landscape due to the digital revolution had rendered previous laws outdated. The freshly amended bill aims to provide clear regulations to ensure at least basic access to copyright-protected...

The Open Access Days (Open-Access-Tage) is the foremost annual Open Access and Open Science conference in the German-speaking area. Its target audience includes OA-experts and advocates, researchers of all disciplines, librarians and representatives from publishing as well as research funders and supporters. This year they were held on October 10th-11th and were hosted by the university library of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. The tenth installment of the Open Access Days with its fo...

Whether it’s citizens gathering data of species population movements, collecting meteorological or atmospheric data, classifying and mapping out their surroundings, translating or annotating texts, analyzing or visualizing data, or bringing their own perspective to the formulation of research questions, openness in Citizen Science (CS) is about more than accessibility or transparency: it means the participation and collaboration of citizens in the scientific process for the benefit of researcher...