On December 6th, 2024, we hosted the first workshop of our project Infra Wiss Blogs (Ochsner and Pampel 2024), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The aim of the workshop was to bring together scholarly bloggers and experts from information infrastructure institutions, so they could exchange experiences, wishes and challenges concerning scholarly blogs.

At last year’s Open-Access-Tage, OA Datenpraxis held a workshop together with the Open Access Monitor at Forschungszentrum Jülich as well as the state-wide Open Access initiatives of Berlin (Open Access Büro Berlin) and Brandenburg (Vernetzungs- und Kompetenzstelle Open Access Brandenburg). The workshop ‘The state and prospects of open access reporting’ outlined different approaches - qualitative and quantitative - to Open Access reporting and

We are thrilled to announce that our group at the Berlin School of Library and Information Science has been honored with the Open Access Award 2024 of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. This recognition, valued at €5,000, underscores our commitment to advancing Open Access in research, education, and knowledge transfer.

In recent years, transformative agreements (TAs) have become a go-to strategy for publishers and research performing organizations aiming to open up access to research (Farley et al. 2021). These agreements promise to bridge traditional subscription-based journal models to an Open Access (OA) future (Borrego, Anglada, and Abadal 2021). But are they delivering on that promise?

I recently had the opportunity to speak on Deutschlandfunk about the Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive. The occasion was the recent cyberattack on the Internet Archive (Schräer 2023). The Wayback Machine plays a crucial role in preserving websites and providing access to our digital past—for researchers, journalists, and the interested public alike.

This week marks the fifteenth annual International Open Access Week. Since 2010, the week has provided a platform to discuss the state and challenges of open access to scientific knowledge. While the early years focused on access to scientific articles (“Open Access Week” 2024), this year’s activities increasingly address other aspects of Open Science.

In the latest episode of “Breitband” on Deutschlandfunk Kultur, there is an interview with Dorothea Strecker from our research group at the Berlin School of Library and Information Science on shadow libraries (Belanger 2024). The occasion for the interview was the lawsuit for damages against LibGen in the United States.

Together with Christian Agi, Michael Beurskens, Marion von Francken, Judith Ludwig, and Bernhard Mittermaier, I have been working on recommendations for the inclusion of artificial intelligence in license agreements with publishers over the past few months.

Scholarly blogs can disseminate current research content quickly and beyond their own specialist community and put it up for discussion. Open communication without paywalls increases the visibility of scholarly research. Researchers as well as information infrastructure and cultural institutions therefore have an interest in supporting scholarly blogs as an Open Access publication format.

As part of the Infra Wiss Blogs (Pampel and Rothfritz 2024) project, we are organizing a first networking workshop for blogging researchers and employees from infrastructure facilities on 06.12.2024. The aim is to share initial experiences of the various stakeholders and promote their exchange. We will also present the initial results of our survey of German science blogs. When? Wednesday, 06.12.2024, 10:30-15:00 Where?