Deep Green - Open Access Transformation

To make scientific research publicable and findable through an institutional repository is a standard service provided by university libraries around the world. By recent European initiatives such as Plan S, open archives and repositories are once again acknowledged for their importance. However, as the COAR membership survey in 2018 found out, among three big challenges related to repositories is the question how to get (high amounts of) content deposited. A new model of cooperation between publishers, researchers and libraries as repository owners is needed.

The German DeepGreen project (2016-2020), funded by the German Research Foundation, is developing an automated workflow to transfer scholarly publications from publishers to open access repositories. The project started with a focus on so-called Alliance licenses (national licenses, negotiated with over a douzen publishers and funded by the German Research Foundation) that include an open access component which allows authors to make their articles, after a shortened embargo period, publicly available through their current institutional or a subject-based repository of their choice. If the institution negotiated the license, it acts as a representative of the author and therefore has the same rights. However, very few institutions use this opportunity due to the high effort associated with manually researching the articles in question and adding them to the repositories.

The DeepGreen project introduces a practical solution to support libraries and scientific institutions by automatically transmitting notifications of available publications. The basic concept is that publishers deposit data files (metadata and full text) and DeepGreen matches them through a routing process to authorized repositories using affiliations included in the publishers metadata. Repositories can upload a file with possible name variations of their institution into their DeepGreen account to improve the matching process. So far the publishers S. Karger AG, Sage Publications, BMJ, De Gruyter and MDPI agreed upon cooperation with DeepGreen. During a second funding phase, which started in August 2018, other licensing models will be examined and in summer 2019 DeepGreen will see a beta launch with a selection of publishers and repositories.

DeepGreen supports research libraries and other institutions in providing access to important research results. It increases the percentage of open access publications which makes it an active player in the field of open access transformation and open science. This presentation will give a simplified introduction of the technical functionalities of DeepGreen Router and highlights the benefits for repositories. It will focus on possible license options that could be included into DeepGreen and the current status of the beta launch for summer 2019.

DeepGreen is in close contact to JISC (UK) and its Publications Router service. We try to learn from each other as much as possible and dream of a network of DeepGreen-like routers all over Europe to make automated green open access happen without any pain for researchers or librarians.