109th Helmholtz Open Science Newsletter

1. DEAL: From payer to player?

In the article “From payer to player - MPDL Services gGmbH as an infrastructure for the open access transformation”, Agi and Geschuhn describe the development of the organizational requirements for the conclusion of publish and read agreements between the German scientific organizations and the major scientific publishers Wiley, Springer Nature and Elsevier. The agreements, which became known as DEAL contracts, bought access to the journal portfolios of these three publishers and discounted open access publishing in their journals for practically all publicly funded scientific institutions in Germany. The open access rate in Germany could thus be significantly increased, especially through publications in hybrid journals.

It was hoped that publish and read agreements would increase the proportion of open access in hybrid journals and thus motivate publishers to convert these journals to pure open access gold journals. It is now clear that the DEAL agreements have succeeded in bundling decentralized financial flows from the scientific organizations to publishers, slowing down price increases but not limiting them to the necessary extent. In addition, the transformative effect that was attributed to the agreements has not materialized. It can also be noted that academic libraries have significantly improved their self-organization, including internal cost recording, in the course of negotiating the DEAL contracts. However, the recognition of the positive results of the DEAL contracts does not detract from the old demand for more control of academic publishing by academia.

4. AI bots are putting a strain on repositories: COAR member survey released

A Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) member survey found that of the responding 66 repositories over 90 % report that they are regularlay encountering aggressive bot activity, leading to performance issues and system outages.
This activity has increased notably over the past two years, affecting both service quality and the resources required for repository management.

Other examples for the impact of increased bot activity are the online image repository DiscoverLife which at the start of this year received so much traffic that its site became unusable, or the fact that some publishers see more bot traffic than human users, as detailed in this Nature News article. The assumption is that these bots are gathering training data for generative AI models. A number of measures are already implemented to reduce access by AI bots, with the difficulty of at the same time not making access more difficult for normal users.

5. The German Kompetenznetzwerk Bibliometrie Uses OpenAlex

In May 2025, the German Kompetenznetzwerk Bibliometrie published selected and curated datasets from OpenAlex for the first time. OpenAlex is a free, web-based academic search engine and comprehensive bibliographic catalog of scientific authors, institutions, and publications.The metadata database offers an alternative to subscription-based platforms such as Scopus, Dimensions, and Web of Science and contains more than 260 million scientific works from 260,800 sources.

The German Kompetenznetzwerk Bibliometrie, funded by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology, and Space (BMFTR) since 2008, previously only used the databases of Elsevier (Scopus) and Clarivate (Web of Science) to provide a quality-assured data infrastructure for bibliometric applications. The inclusion of the OpenAlex data sets demonstrates a commitment to promoting the use of open bibliometric data and contributing to the evolving open bibliometric landscape.

6. Current Developments on Open Research Information and Open Infrastructures

In April 2024, the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information was published with the declared goal of making open research information the norm. Since then, over 100 institutions have signed the Barcelona Declaration (10 from Germany) and there are over 50 supporting data and infrastructure organizations. A Barcelona Declaration Office with an executive director and the position of a community manager has been established to advance the governance structure and support the activities of the institutions worldwide. The fields of action defined in the Roadmap on Open Research Information have been worked on by representatives from signatory and contributing institutions in seven working groups since the beginning of 2025, for example on sustainable infrastructures, the evaluation of open data sources and the identification of the benefits and advantages of open research information. An exchange on the current status of all activities as well as a professional and practical exchange recently took place at a working meeting in Bologna as part of this year's Workshops on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata. In an extensive series of presentations, over 100 participants were also able to learn about and discuss the latest findings and challenges in scientometric analyses and systems for open research information. The state and activities on open research information of some of the signatory institutions from Germany will be presented on June 25 at this year's Bibliothekskongress in Bremen.

There is also news on the subject of open infrastructures: The working group ‘Towards Open Infrastructures for Responsible Research Assessment’ (OI4RRA) of the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) has published a working paper on a ‘Conceptual Architecture for the Implementation of a Responsible Research Assessment Framework Built on Open Infrastructures’. Moreover, TSOSI (Transparency to Sustain Open Science Infrastructure), a platform for mapping organizations that have supported or are supporting open science infrastructures, has recently been launched. The aim of TSOSI is to support the sustainability of open science infrastructures and help with decision-making on funding infrastructures.

7. Rescuing Scientific Information Becomes a Global Task

The current cuts in research funding in the USA are the result of far-reaching political decisions. These cuts risk not only jeopardizing projects, scientific information, and infrastructure, but also compromising the independence and freedom of research. Massive funding cuts or the tying of funding to political guidelines leads to an increased influence of government and ideology on research content and priorities.

It becomes clear how fragile access to valuable research results, e.g., from the social sciences, but also to health or climate data, can be. Data has become inaccessible or is at risk of being lost. This also affects long-term observations and international data infrastructures whose continued funding is at risk. Software that is used worldwide to process and analyze research data could also no longer be developed or maintained - data processing chains could be interrupted and international cooperation could come to a standstill.

This has triggered a wave of data rescue initiatives, in which Helmholtz centers are also involved. One of the most prominent examples is the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI), which is involved in the PANGAEA climate data project. PANGAEA cooperates closely with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the leading US authority for weather and oceanography. Together with other participants, they secure and archive endangered data and make it available to the scientific community. At the same time, the ZB MED is committed to securing data in the biomedical and life sciences in the event of limited availability of PubMed. The TIB is currently archiving data from the arXiv preprint server. At the same time, initiatives such as Safeguarding Research and Culture or Data Rescue Project are committed to the long-term preservation of scientific information.

The preservation of knowledge therefore requires not only the technical archiving of data, but also the preservation of data processing chains, international data infrastructures and global cooperation.

8. The Perils of a "Gold Standard" for (Open) Science

Efforts to preserve scientific information are all the more important because political changes can also threaten the principles of open science. In May 2025, a recent Executive Order from the US government entitled “Restoring Gold Standard Science” aims to improve the integrity of science in policymaking. However, the rigid “Gold Standard” it sets out raises concerns that it could undermine the very principles it seeks to uphold.

Demanding unattainable perfection in research — such as requiring every study to be fully reproducible, transparent, and unbiased — risks the dismissal of valuable evidence in favour of political ideology. The Center for Open Science (COS) rightly points out that good science is an iterative process of building and critiquing evidence, not a quest for flawlessness. A key concern is the empowerment of political appointees to assess research based on this “gold standard”. This approach undermines peer review and introduces the potential for partisan interference, effectively delegating truth-finding to the state — a historically problematic practice. COS warns that political interference can jeopardise the objectivity and integrity of scientific research and appeals to restore and promote the need for good scientific practice - including transparency, reproducibility and open access to data and research results.

Recommended Reading

Allen, L., Barbour, V., Cobey, K., Faulkes, Z., Hazlett, H., Lawrence, R., Lima, G., Massah, F., & Schmidt, R. (2025). A practical guide to implementing responsible research assessment at research performing organizations. Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15000683

Arasteh-Roodsary, S. L., Gaillard, V., Garbuglia, F., Mounier, P., Pölönen, J., Proudman, V., Rooryck, J., Saenen, B., & Stone, G. (2025). Diamond Open Access recommendations and guidelines for institutions, funders, sponsors, donors, and policymakers. DIAMAS Project. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15518745

Bos, J., & McCurley, K. S. (2025). Lowering the cost of diamond open access journals. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2504.10424

Jahn, N. (2025). Estimating transformative agreement impact on hybrid open access: a comparative large-scale study using Scopus, Web of Science and open metadata. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2504.15038

Jensen, E. A., & Katz, D. S. (2025). Awareness of FAIR and FAIR4RS among international research software funders. Scientific Data, 12(1), 627. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-04820-4

Mabile, L., Shmagun, H., Erdmann, C., Cambon-Thomsen, A., Thomsen, M., & Grattarola, F. (2025). Recommendations on open science rewards and incentives: guidance for multiple stakeholders in research. Data Science Journal, 24. https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2025-015

Pattinson, D., & Currie, G. (2025). Toward science-led publishing. Learned Publishing, 38(3), e2012. https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.2012

Sun, G., Friedrich, T., Gregory, K., & Mathiak, B. (2024). Supporting data discovery: comparing perspectives of support specialists and researchers. Data Science Journal, 23(1). https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2024-048