The aim of the project openCost is to create a technical infrastructure that makes publication costs freely accessible and exchangeable via standardized interfaces and formats. This is supposed to enable cost transparency on an institutional, national, and international level.

To achieve this, we are developing a standardized metadata schema to record, retrieve and map all publication costs of an academic institution in a structured form. We are proposing the established OAI-PMH interface for an automatic exchange of this data. A third focus of the project is the extension of the Electronic Journals Library (EZB) with special functions for displaying publication costs and funding option.