OPERAS welcomes the University of Bielefeld

We are glad to welcome the University of Bielefeld as a new ordinary member of the OPERAS community in 2024.
Bielefeld University, especially the 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 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.
Bielefeld University has been an active contributor to OPERAS for several years. Since 2021, the university has been supporting the OPERAS Open Access Business Models Special Interest Group with an in-kind contribution, helping to explore sustainable publishing solutions.
In addition, Bielefeld’s academic search engine, BASE, has been a fundamental data provider for the OPERAS service GoTriple since 2021, enhancing discoverability for open scholarly content in the Social Sciences and Humanities.
Beyond these contributions, Bielefeld University was also involved in the PALOMERA project, where it played a crucial role in quantitative data collection, data coding, enrichment, and analysis. The university actively engaged with relevant stakeholders to raise awareness and disseminate the project’s findings & results, further strengthening the open access ecosystem.
“I am very pleased that after all the years in which we have had many points of contact with OPERAS, we are now also an official member of this great community. There will be many opportunities to intensify our collaboration in the coming years, particularly in the context of Diamond Open Access.” (Dirk Pieper, Deputy Director at Bielefeld University Library)
The University of Bielefeld will contribute to the Open Access Business Models Special Interest Group.
We are looking forward to further collaborations.
For more information about our new ordinary member please visit: uni-bielefeld.de/ub/
OPERAS
OPERAS is the Research Infrastructure supporting open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in the European Research Area. Its mission is to coordinate and federate resources in Europe to efficiently address the scholarly communication needs of European researchers in the field of SSH. OPERAS’ aim is to make Open Science a reality for research in the SSH and achieve a scholarly communication system where knowledge produced in the SSH benefits researchers, academics, students and more generally the whole society across Europe and worldwide, without barriers.
You want to know more. Contact us and find more information on joining OPERAS here: https://operas-eu.org/about/want-to-know-more/want-to-join-operas/
OPERAS Coordinator Community: Pierre Mounier pierre.mounier@operas-eu.org
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
OPERAS Editorial Team (March 14, 2025). OPERAS welcomes the University of Bielefeld. OPERAS. Retrieved April 23, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13h2n