DeepGreen

Science needs new forms of collaboration with publishers to facilitate the open access transformation of the German scientific publication landscape called for by the Alliance of Scientific Organisations in Germany and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The DFG has been supporting the negotiation of so-called Alliance licenses between libraries and publishers since 2011. These licenses incorporate extensive rights relating to open access archiving: both authors and the institutions that represent them are able to make articles published in licensed journals freely accessible in repositories of their choice with only short embargo periods or none at all.
Building on these open access components, the “DeepGreen” project sponsored by the DFG is demonstrating a possible new model for cooperating with publishers: DeepGreen is based on the automated delivery of article data from publishers to repositories. The goal is to actually facilitate online access to the majority of the scientific publications in specialist journals that licensing legislation allows to be made freely accessible online.

From 2016 to the end of 2017, DeepGreen used prototypes to test the feasibility of this goal. Now, during the second phase (2018-2020), the project aims to establish the most highly automated workflow possible in cooperation with publishers, authorised libraries and other institutions. The technical basis of this workflow is a central intermediary data distribution station which guarantees the automated, legally watertight delivery of metadata, including full texts, from the publishers directly to authorised institutional repositories. The initial aim is to establish a national service based on binding agreements with publishers and libraries that implements the terms of the Alliance licenses in a holistic manner. The possibility of applying the DeepGreen concept to other forms of license (FID licenses, consortium licenses, gold open access agreements) is also being examined. An additional concept currently at the planning stage comprises automated delivery to subject-specific repositories and research information systems (RIS).

The Cooperative Library Network Berlin-Brandenburg (KOBV), the Bavarian Library Network (BVB), the Bavarian State Library (BSB), the libraries of the Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU) and the Technical University of Berlin (TU Berlin), and the Helmholtz Open Science Coordination Office at the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) are all partners in this project.

More information about the DeepGreen project is available at
https://www.oa-deepgreen.de/