(16 Jun 2026) On March 24, 2026, in response to a lawsuit by seventeen academics, a German Court ruled that a mandatory article manuscript deposit requirement imposed by the German State of Baden-Württemberg on researchers working or affiliated with educational institutions within the state was void ab initio. The plaintiffs had alleged that the deposit requirement infringed their…
(26 Sep 2023) A translation believed to be the oldest Japanese-language text on Western science has been discovered at a German library. The translation — thought to date to the late-16th or early-17th century — rewords a Western book on cosmology compiled by a Spanish missionary active in Japan at the time. One expert…
(30 Aug 2023) The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, in collaboration with Microsoft, is one of the first research organizations in Europe to launch an internal AI chatbot that works similarly to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The FhGenie generative AI solution lets employees securely create, edit or modify texts on the basis of non-public data. The GDPR-compliant service was introduced for…
(27 Nov 2020) The German government has announced a massive €4 billion (US$4.8 billion) budget to support research projects addressing global warming and sustainability under its FONA strategy over the coming five years. Run by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research or BMBF, the FONA (Forschung für Nachhaltigkeit) strategy for research on sustainability…
The South Asian country is now fourth in the world for science productivity but experts say quality issues remain (22 Oct 2020) India’s research output has overtaken Germany’s for the first time and is fast catching up to the UK’s, but questions remain on how quickly the country can make progress on research quality. Figures…
(9 Jan 2020) Springer Nature and MPDL Services GmbH on behalf of Projekt DEAL today announce that the formal contract for the world’s largest transformative Open Access (OA) agreement to date has been signed. Dated 1 January 2020, the agreement provides OA publishing services and full reading access to Springer Nature journals to scholars and…
(1 Nov 2019) Ruhr University Bochum (RUB), known as one of the largest and leading universities in Germany, has signed an agreement with the Philippine government for the creation of a Philippine studies program and the promotion of Philippine culture. According to the Philippine Consulate in Frankfurt, the agreement involves the donation of approximately EUR83,000…
(15 January 2019) Reporting results from a comprehensive survey of publishers in the German-speaking world, Christian Kaier and Karin Lackner explore the attitudes of smaller publishers towards open access, finding both rising levels of interest, but also ongoing uncertainty and resistance over making a transition to open access publishing. While libraries and funding bodies in German-speaking countries have been negotiating…
(13February 2017) Elsevier has chosen to continue providing access to Elsevier journals for dozens of German institutions that cancelled their individual subscriptions at the end of 2016. They did so anticipating that a new Germany-wide license agreement would be in place by January this year, which Elsevier regrets has so far has not been achievable.…
This IFLA Satellite Meeting 2017 takes place in Berlin, Germany on 15-17 August 2017 and is hosted by BBAW, DARIAH-EU, DINI, IFLA, LIBER and the Library of the Humboldt University Berlin. Digital Humanities is widely understood to mean the use of computer-aided and data-driven research methods and techniques in both the arts and humanities. Some…