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.

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?

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?

The Research and Teaching Group Information Management is conducting a survey on the topic of recording publication costs at research performing institutions in Germany.

We are excited to announce the launch of our new project, “Infra Wiss Blogs - Kooperative Informationsinfrastruktur für wissenschaftliche Blogs” funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG 2023). Blogs have become an indispensable component of digital science communication, serving as a platform for scholarly communication, a diary for documenting research findings in the context of open science, or a showcase for communicating

The conversation about advancing the open access transformation has been revitalized by the “Council Conclusions on High-Quality, Transparent, Open, Trustworthy, and Equitable Scholarly Publishing” issued by the EU Science Ministries in May 2023 (Council of the European Union 2023). In September 2023, we organized the conference “Community-Driven Open Access Publishing” as a satellite event of the Open Access Days 2023 (Bibliotheks- und