Open access
TIB is actively engaged in promoting open access – free access to scientific and scholarly publications. We provide support to authors, publishers and editors, and develop services and software as part of our work in the international open access community.
- TIB Open Publishing is our platform for publishing scientific journals and conference publications.
- We operate RENATE – a repository for science and technology – and the Leibniz Universität Hannover Institutional Repository.
- Through licence agreements with publishers, in particular Read & Publish agreements, we make publications freely accessible and facilitate open access publishing.
- In the context of KOALA, we organise consortia for the collaborative funding of APC-free (“Diamond”) open access journals.
- By providing publishing funds for Leibniz Universität Hannover and the Leibniz Association, we help authors to fund open access publishing.
- We provide advice and information to scholars on scientific publishing and open access, and to publishers and editors on journal flipping, journal creation and the open access options available to them.
- In our Open Access Policy, we commit to the principles of open access and expect our employees to publish open access.
Open data and FAIR data
TIB is actively engaged in promoting a culture of open data. In this context, we refer to the Open Knowledge Foundation’s definition of “open data” and adhere to the FAIR principles for research data. To us, this means that we embrace, convey and support open data processes.
- We have our own policy on research data management and open data publication, which emphasises the importance of research data in the process of scientific knowledge acquisition and the potential of its reuse.
- We provide information and advice on research data management and how to handle research data.
- We offer a variety of services related to data: the provision of open data and data interfaces, the Leibniz Data Manager (LDM) data management system and the TIB Terminology Service, which facilitates the search, download and curation of terminologies of various disciplines.
- We team up with partners to provide specialist infrastructures in the context of Specialised Information Services (FIDs) and the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI).
- We contribute actively to committees such as of the NFDI, the Leibniz Association, the Research Data Alliance (RDA) and the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) with the aim of driving open data.
Open research and citizen science
TIB contributes to the digital opening of science and culture. It helps communities to adopt new methods and tools into scientific practice.
- We want to embed open science in teaching at Hannover University of Applied Sciences and Arts.
- In NFDI4Culture, we develop tools for the collaborative annotation of images and 3D.
- We organise editorial and publishing workflows for open access textbooks and specialist books (NextGen Books).
- We research and learn with open data in the Coding da Vinci Lower Saxony 2020, Places of Gestapo terror in present-day Lower Saxony and Remember Me! projects.
- We assist other libraries in the uptake of citizen science approaches.
Open research information
TIB promotes scientific discourse and a commons of open research information by ensuring that the metadata describing scientific output – such as journal articles, books, journals, videos, software and research data – can be reused easily and freely.
- We support initiatives for open metadata such as the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) and the Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA).
- We promote open source software for handling research information and contribute to the implementation of the open source current research information system VIVO.
- We work with and on open standards for describing research information, such as CERIF and the Research Core Dataset.
- We connect experts from research and administration, and contribute to various committees and working groups.
Open education
Open educational resources (OER) give educators the opportunity to share their results with each other, and offer learners open access to education. TIB promotes and supports this exchange on higher education teaching and learning.
- twillo is the portal for publishing, finding and sharing OER in university teaching in Lower Saxony.
- Our OER search index OERSI connects nationally and internationally distributed OER repositories of federal state initiatives and institutions.
- The digital guide on “Sharing educational resources” helps educators to develop and provide OER.
- TIB’s AV-Portal is our platform for open videos in science and education.
Open source
When developing new services and products, TIB increasingly values the use of open source software and the provision of its in-house developments under open licences on the GitHub and GitLab platforms.
Our goal is also to gradually convert previous commercial or proprietary software solutions into open solutions, and to publicly develop them. When using open source frameworks, we endeavour to plan and develop adaptations, extensions and improvements in consultation with the community, and to incorporate them into existing products.
