PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

With the rise of Gold Open Access publishing in "author pays" models a new kind of metadata gains importance: costs directly associated with publications. Adding so-called transformative agreements as well as scholarly led Open Access to the mix further increases their importance, as cost transparency has to be a guiding principle for sustainability.

Repositories provide high quality metadata in various formats via established interfaces. Enhancing these metadata by cost data thus makes them a potential corner stone to achieve the desired transparency.

Therefore, the project openCost developed, together with the community, a XML schema to model cost data both for individual articles and, most recently, to handle contracts.

We give an in-depth view of the openCost schema, demonstrate real world implementations and provide some glimpses on an associated workflow to collect the data. This will enable developers to gain an understanding of the requirements for adding openCost compatibility to existing repository systems.

The openCost partner University of Bielefeld already implemented harvesting of the openCost format via OAI-PMH for their own, openly available aggregator platform OpenAPC. Their openly available metadata store allows a wide variety of analyses and thus showcases the strength of the openCost approach.