Qucosa - HTWK Leipzig: Bearbeitung und Monitoring von Article Processing Charges an Universitätsbibliotheken in Deutschland

Article Processing Charges (APCs) have established themselves as the predominant business model with publishers for the transition from closed access to open access. The processing and monitoring of APCs, according to the initial thesis of this work, poses great challenges for university libraries, as publication numbers and costs are constantly increasing. The work surveys the current status at eight institutions by means of guided qualitative interviews with experts. Content-structuring qualitative content analysis was used to evaluate the interviews. The guiding research questions for the study were: What are the workflows for processing and monitoring APCs at German university libraries? Which tools are used? Are the systems used interoperable? What metadata is collected and where? What do libraries know about decentralized costs? The evaluation of the study shows that efficient and scalable work processes and tools are only established to a limited extent at German university libraries, but are in the process of being established. Workflows are often characterized by a lack of interoperability of the work tools used. The eight institutions organize the individual workflow steps very heterogeneously. A central invoice processing for all publication costs of a university is not common. Several work tools are usually used for processing and monitoring APCs, which vary from library to library. Very few libraries document all metadata recommended for monitoring. In addition, hardly any institutions record all metadata in a single information system. Libraries have very detailed knowledge regarding costs handled by publication funds. Here, monitoring is established and works well. The situation is different with decentralized costs, so that an overview of the total costs of publishing is often missing.