This presentation talks about the effort to support the scholarly open access journal publishing and to improve the access and the dissemination of research information in Germany. Several past initiatives and their results will be presented along with the information about current and future plans.

It all started with the open access journals “Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research” (FQS) and “querelles-net” and their request for a better technical support for the editorial work with the reviewers and the authors, and for more attractiveness for the readers. At the same time, the Open Journal Systems (OJS) 2.0 was born and it looked very promising. Unfortunately, OJS hadn't been translated into German and it didn’t provide full multilingual support, which were some of the main features needed. Thus, the first efforts made were to implement that functionality. The translation into German as well as full multilingual support were integrated and released with the OJS 2.2 version.

Pretty soon more and more journals in Germany were moving to or starting to use OJS. A small user inquiry helped to group similar functional requirements and to extract the major ones, like support for URN, support of DOI registration agencies mEDRA and DataCite, integration with other systems (e.g. German National Library, Open Access Statistics, DRIVER, OpenAIRE), search optimization, and full support for review journals. Additionally, there was also a need for a better communication, the exchange and the coordination between the OJS users and their activities. The project "Functional extensions and value added services for OJS", founded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), aimed to achieve the functional optimization mentioned above as well as to build the community and support. Most of the development results are part of the current OJS release, except those specific for Germany.

The current trend shows increasing OJS usage in Germany and different hosting models, leading to new and different requirements. As a result new software development and organizational activities of the smaller scope arise, which require better community networking, better organization and coordination. Future efforts will be to build a stronger, more sustainable and German-wide OJS infrastructure, and to make the publishing of the scientific journals with OJS easier, better supported, extended and long-term secured.

With this presentation we hope to provide an overview of some of the OJS activities and their results in Germany, but we would also like to inspire and give the ideas for future ones. Although initiated in a small context (e.g. a journal or a region) such projects have the potential to give much more, to have a bigger impact, and to bring broader advantages and benefits.