Germany
Executive Assembly Member:
Max Weber Stiftung
MWS is one of the leading agencies supporting German research in the humanities abroad. It is a legal entity closely linked to the German Federal Government located in Bonn. It comprises ten humanities research institutes around the world, which provide a bridge function between the host nations and Germany and play an important role in the international science scene. Being a multi-polar network, the institutes collaborate in the promotion of the internationalization of science. The foundation’s goal is to promote research with a focus on history, culture, economic and social sciences in selected countries and a mutual understanding between Germany and the host countries.
For more information visit: https://www.maxweberstiftung.de/
Supporting Member:
Georg-August-University Göttingen – UGOE
Göttingen State and University Library (SUB) is one of the largest libraries in Germany and a leader in the development of digital libraries. UGOE is one of the leading open access institutions and e-Infrastructure innovators in Germany and internationally. UGOE establishes dedicated research environments for the humanities in national, European and ESFRI activities; notably, it held the management (together with France) and technical coordination (together with Austria) within the construction phase of the ESFRI project DARIAH, resulting in the ERIC DARIAH-EU. These and other projects address organizational and technical aspects such as virtual research environments and research infrastructures for scientific data (e-Research), research data management, data curation and long-term preservation (e.g. PERICLES, German Federation for the Curation of Biological Data). Via the University press, UGOE is either associated or networked to publishing associations such as AEUP, OASPA, OAPEN library, the working group of German-speaking university presses and the US-based Library Publishing Coalition.
For more information visit: uni-goettingen.de
Ordinary Member:
University of Bielefeld
Bielefeld University Library is a pioneer of the Open Access movement in Germany. In 2005, Bielefeld University adopted the first Open Access policy at a German university. Since 2004, the University Library has been developing and operating the academic search engine BASE, which now indexes over 400 million references from over 11,000 data providers (including repositories, journals and digital collections), displays the Open Access status of each document as far as possible and makes it accessible. Other contributions of Bielefeld University Library to the Open Access infrastructure are OpenAPC, an open data service for transparent monitoring of fee-based Open Access publishing, and oa.finder, a service to make it easier for researchers to find a suitable publication medium for their Open Access publication, taking various criteria into account.
Bielefeld University Library has contributed its expertise to numerous international (e.g. DRIVER, Europeana, OpenAIRE, PALOMERA) and national projects. As part of the “German Service Centre for Diamond Open Access”, funded by the German Research Foundation from 2025 until 2028, Bielefeld University Library will create a database-supported registry for Diamond Open Access journal titles in Germany.
For more information please visit: uni-bielefeld.de/ub/
Knowledge Unlatched – KU
Knowledge Unlatched works to implement a collaborative business model that enables libraries to support the publishing of monographs via existing publishers (especially university presses) by paying for the fixed publication costs in exchange for the books being issued on an Open Access licence. KU works collaboratively with a number of organisations including over 400 libraries in 25 countries. KU not only works towards opening up access to humanities and social science research monographs it also acts as an advocacy network supporting other OA initiatives around the world.
For more information visit: knowledgeunlatched.org