Funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), our research project Pro OAR DE investigates current challenges in operating institutional repositories (IR) in Germany. Since completing our initial research phase—which included a systematic review and an interview study with IR managers at academic institutions—we have organized four networking forums since November 2024.

In April, two members of our research group were featured in interviews: Dorothea Strecker, who has been studying shadow libraries for many years, was interviewed by the Norwegian newspaper Klassekampen (Stormyren Larsen and Ugelstad Aas 2025). The interview was prompted by the investigation “The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem” published in The Atlantic (Reisner 2025). Heinz Pampel was interviewed for the @mediasres program

Background As part of the project module Open Science as a Field of Action for Scientific Institutions , students from the Institute for Library and Information Science at Humboldt University zu Berlin (HU), under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Heinz Pampel, organized an event. During the winter semester of 2024/25, the students examined strategies on how scientific institutions shape and promote the topic of Open Science.

Am 28.03.2025 veranstaltete das Projekt OA Datenpraxis (Pampel et al. 2024) das erste Webinar zum Thema ”Erfassung von Publikationskosten an wissenschaftlichen Einrichtungen in Deutschland”. In dem Webinar wurden Ergebnisse einer Umfrage vorgestellt, die im Jahr 2024 durchgeführt wurde.

We are pleased to announce that the projects OA Datenpraxis and Infra Wiss Blogs of the Information Management Research Group from the Berlin School of Library and Information Science at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin will be represented at this year’s BID Congress. Furthermore, Heinz Pampel will be involved in several other events during the BID Congress.

Wir laden Sie herzlich zur Veranstaltung “OA Datenpraxis Webinar: Erfassung von Publikationskosten an wissenschaftlichen Einrichtungen in Deutschland” ein, die am 28.03.2025 von 10:00 bis 11:00 CET über Zoom stattfindet.

In a time when research data is increasingly at the heart of research integrity, discussions about data sharing, openness, and reusability have gained prominence. Yet, the ethical complexities surrounding research data—who collects it, how it is used, and whose interests it serves—are often sidelined.

The Ambassadors for Open Science program of the Berlin University Alliance, BUA aims to promote the knowledge and application of Open Science in various subjects.

In my PhD research, I look at DataRescue or Data Refuge movements, for example through the work of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) (“Environmental Data & Governance Initiative” n.d.) to understand how people respond when they fear data is at risk.

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