Bye Bye Open Access
A personal look back at two decades
Dear Open Access supporters, dear colleagues,
After more than 20 years, I will leave the Max Planck Society (MPG). This also means that I will no longer be working in the field of Open Access policy.
My involvement with Open Access goes back quite a long way which I realized again while preparing for my departure.
As a former member of the board of the German Physical Society, I was involved in the founding of the open access journal ‘"New Journal of Physics’ as early as 2002. That is why I was invited by the MPG to the first Berlin Open Access Conference – which was not even called that in 2003. There I was able to witness 19 organisations sign the ‘Berlin Declaration’. Since then, that number has grown to almost 800!
From 2004, I was responsible for open access policy issues at the Max Planck Society. Since then, I have organised several ‘Berlin Open Access’ conferences and also initiated the first open access conference for students and early career researchers, which took place in Berlin in 2013. I think that was one of my best ideas!
From the outset, I was also involved in the planning and implementation of eLife, the open-access journal founded in October 2011 by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (USA), the Wellcome Trust (UK) and the MPG.
The ten years during which I had the privilege of chairing the Science Europe Open Access working group were probably the most ‘international’ time for me. Together with colleagues from the other member organisations of Science Europe, a number of important position papers on open access were developed and adopted by Science Europe. The published results of this work range from the 2012 position paper „Principles for the Transition to Open Access to Research Publications“to the „Briefing Paper on Open Access Monitoring“, with which this working group ended in 2021.
At the national level, I co-chaired for many years the Open Access working group of the Alliance of Science Organisations in Germany, together with Johannes Fournier (DFG) and others. That, too, was a time I look back on fondly.
But the most important thing was certainly the cooperation within the MPG!
The MPG's commitment to open access, which has now lasted more than 20 years, would not have been possible without the ongoing committment and backing of Presidents Peter Gruss and Martin Stratmann. One of the most forward-looking and far-reaching decisions was the founding of the Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL) on 1 January 2007. MPDL’s Ralf Schimmer consistently promoted the transformation to open access in Germany and internationally. I don't think there was an explicit motto, but in my view these activities can be characterised as ‘making open access possible’. Together with the libraries at the Max Planck Institutes, an impressive open access ‘landscape’ has been created: on the basis of agreements with genuine open access publishers and so-called ‘transformative’ OA contracts (including DEAL), authors from the MPG can choose from more than 12,500 journals if they want to publish open access. The associated costs are covered centrally by the MPDL.
The open access activities also have a major international impact. This is due in no small part to the series of Berlin Open Access Conferences and is manifested, among other things, in the OA2020 Initiative, which is being driven forward by Colleen Campbell. This shows how important it is for science organisations worldwide to agree on common goals, share experiences and coordinate their actions.
I would like to express my wholehearted thanks to all those I have mentioned by name here, and to all the others with whom I have had the pleasure of working during this time at the various levels and in different contexts.
Unfortunately the rise in geopolitical tensions, which for many are at odds with the concept of openness in general, are also a threat for the growing momentum of open science. Nevertheless I very much hope that the MPG will continue to actively participate in the development of a science-friendly, transparent, inclusive, sustainable and financially fair open access publication system in the future, in line with the final sentence of the ‘Mission Statement’, which was formulated ten years after the ‘Berlin Declaration’:
“It is time to return control of scholarly publishing to the scholars.”
Goodbye and good luck!