Report from the Open Access Days 2024

This year's Open Access Days (Open-Access-Tage), the central conference on open access in the German-speaking world, took place in Cologne from September 10 to 12. Under the conference motto 'DEAL, Diamond and beyond – Open Access Between Sovereignty and Dependence', the local committee – consisting of the University and City Library of Cologne, the Cologne University of Applied Sciences, GESIS, the Catholic University of Applied Sciences North Rhine-Westphalia and the ZB MED - Information Center for Life Sciences – invited participants to the 18th edition of the Open Access Days at the Südstadt campus of the Cologne University of Applied Sciences. Around 300 participants made their way to Cologne. The Helmholtz Open Science Office also attended the event.

Over three days, there was a rich program consisting of three keynotes, two discussions, ten sessions with a total of 30 presentations, 19 workshops, a poster session and the tool marketplace, as well as a supporting program such as a conference dinner and guided tours of the libraries of the organizing institutions.

The conference and thus the first day were opened with welcoming addresses by Prof. Dr. Klaus Becker (Vice President for Research at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences), Prof. Dr. Claus Cursiefen (Vice Rector for Research at the University of Cologne) and Dr. Anja Oberländer (Deputy Director of the Communication, Information and Media Centre at the University of Konstanz and Chair of the program committee of the Open Access Days). The thematic program commenced with the first keynote entitled 'Diamond Open Access: Fourth and Final Wave of Open Access Funding?' by Niels Taubert (Bielefeld University). Taubert outlined four waves of open access: institutional repositories as the first wave, article processing charges and publication funds as the second wave, transformation contracts as the third wave, and diamond open access as the fourth and current wave. Taubert argued that these waves would always follow the same four phases, namely first enthusiasm, then implementation, then a visualization of performance and dependencies, and finally disillusionment and disappointment. With regard to diamond open access, Taubert concluded that science policy expectations appear unrealistic, as there is a lack of role models for large diamond open access journals in Germany and the unpaid work of precarious employees could turn into instability; and that “permanent funding beyond local contingencies” is therefore required. Two parallel sessions and numerous workshops led to a busy first day of the conference. The 'Science and Communication' session featured a presentation entitled 'Science-Led Publishing – Perspectives for Research Institutions' by the Helmholtz Open Science Office, which outlined publication infrastructures supported and managed by the scientific community itself as a promising approach to regaining sovereignty. Lea Maria Ferguson presented the discussion process taking place in the Helmholtz Association on the further development of the open access transformation and the move towards scholar-led publication infrastructures and scholar-led publishing (see the discussion paper 'Scholarly Publishing at Helmholtz: Status Quo, Scenarios for Scholar-Led Publishing'). Furthermore, in the afternoon, the OA Datenpraxis project, in which the Helmholtz Open Science Office is involved, together with the project partners, hosted the workshop 'Status and perspectives of open access reporting'.

In keeping with the conference motto, the second day began with sessions on 'Diamond and Fair' and 'Diamond and Funding', workshops on diamond open access and DEAL and a fishbowl discussion entitled 'How Does DEAL Influence the German Publishing Landscape?'. The midday time slot was dedicated exclusively to the tool marketplace and the poster session. Here, the Helmholtz Open Science Office was represented with contributions from three of its third-party funded projects: with the poster 'Persistent Identifiers for Open and FAIR Science' for the PID Network Germany and with the joint poster 'Information Budget - Navigating the Paths to Open Access Transformation' for open-access.network and Transform2Open. Chaired by Marcel Meistring from the Helmholtz Open Science Office (who was also part of the program committee), Victoria Tsoukala from the European Commission spoke in the subsequent second keynote on the future of scholarly publishing and the activities of the EU. Tsoukala covered a wide range of topics and presented key initiatives for a fairer and more transparent scholarly communication ecosystem with a focus on key EU policies and initiatives including the transformation of Open Research Europe (ORE) into a collectively funded and operated non-profit publication service. Further sessions and workshops were dedicated to topics such as publication infrastructures, best practices and information budgets; there was also a workshop with the involvement of the Helmholtz Open Science Office ('Science Blogs as a Blueprint for Science-led Open Access Publishing'). The day ended with a well-attended conference dinner for the often too short time for conversation.

The third and final day of the conference began with a lively and sometimes heated panel discussion entitled 'Publish and Pay or Perish?!', which was attended by representatives from research institutions, research funding and the publishing industry. Subsequent sessions focused on the topics of Open Journal Systems (OJS) and Open Monograph Press (OMP) as well as the big challenge of realizing the transformation, while other workshops dealt with topics such as subject repositories between technical-organizational professionalization and connecting with their research communities or gamification in open access consulting. The Open Access Days were concluded with a third keynote on the implementation of the open science agenda and the contribution of the German Commission for UNESCO by Dr. Fatma Rebeggiani (UNESCO Germany), who presented the developments of UNESCO and the activities of the German Commission for UNESCO based on the UNESCO Open Science Recommendation from 2021. The focus was particularly on the question of equity in open access in the context of international scientific cooperation, for which Rebeggiani also presented a number of good practice examples from the global context. At the very end, it was time for the poster awards and, of course, the concluding remarks with the announcement of next year's conference: the German-speaking open access community will meet again from September 17 to 19 in Constance – for the Open Access Days 2025.

All keynotes and sessions as well as the panel discussion were streamed live for free. The streams are also available afterwards on the ZB MED YouTube channel. At a later date, the presentations will also be published individually on the TIB's AV-Portal. In addition, much of the content, such as the posters and presentation slides, will gradually be published in the Zenodo community of the Open Access Days 2024. A short report by the PID Network describes what the conference had to offer on the topic of persistent identifiers.