GOAL Information and Collabotarion Hub (GOAL-Hub)

Co-funded by swissuniversities, GOAL-Hub is a one-year project led by the ZHAW university library and developed in collaboration with the HSLU library. It also counts with the support of a counselling Sounding Board composed by five further libraries from Swiss HEIs.

GOAL-Hub aims to strengthen Green Open Access in Switzerland by offering information about Green OA policies for diverse publication forms in the GOAL-Database and by building a password-protected collaborative hub for repository managers to share policies, experiences, and information on publishers.

In the first phase of the project, information on Green OA policies for diverse publication forms such as book contributions will be collected and added to the GOAL-Database. This information, while being publicly available is scattered throughout the Internet, being thus difficult to find. Currently no public database offers such a service. This information will complement the current information on OA policies from Swiss practice-oriented journals offered in the GOAL-Database.

In a second phase, a password-protected platform within the database will be developed. In this platform repository managers from the participating and associated institutions can document their experiences and individual agreements with publishers and collaborate internally.

In offering these services, GOAL-Hub aims to connect individual activities at Swiss HEIs in the field of Green OA and so to strengthen coordination and collaboration between infrastructures and services at the national level. In doing so, the project contributes to demonstrate that cost-effective, sustainable partnerships between HEIs and publishers are possible while maintaining and fostering bibliodiversity in the Swiss publishing landscape.

GOAL-Hub runs from July 2025 to the end of June 2026.