At the University of Hohenheim, a comprehensive technical and organisational workflow and cost-management framework for scholarly publishing is being developed, which simultaneously forms the basis of a university-wide information budget. The central instrument is the publication fund established in 2024, which is administratively managed by the Communication, Information and Media Centre (KIM). A standardised digital application workflow with clear funding criteria ensures efficient processing, with tiered funding caps for articles, “top journals” and monographs. All funded publications are recorded in the Open Access Database (OADB) developed at KIM, including unique identifiers, invoices and publication metadata, and are reported to OpenAPC according to a standardised guideline.In parallel, KIM is building an integrated information budget based on the shell model proposed by Mittermaier (2022). Expenditures and funding sources for publication and acquisition costs are centrally aggregated. The introduction and further differentiation of cost accounts, access to central and decentralized accounts (in cooperation with the Finance Department), as well as the stepwise digitisation of invoicing workflows aim to establish cost transparency for APCs, PAR fees, transformative agreements, traditional acquisitions, document delivery and other cost types. The OADB is being expanded into the central cost-management system, into which currently dispersed data (e.g. from SAP, the library system, and Excel spreadsheets) are migrated and integrated via interfaces. A comprehensive linkage with the institutional repository hohPublica and the university bibliography (via DOI and ORCID) is planned in order to establish a consistent, queryable information budget that supports monitoring, reporting (including to OpenAPC and the OA Monitor), and the strategic governance of publication funding.
Rudaev et al. (Thu,) studied this question.