Why CODA?

The ongoing development of sustainable financing models and the steadily growing number of open access publications in scientific institutions increasingly require a transparent and sustainable organization and documentation of publications, as well as the associated financial flows. The expansion of the Open Access culture at these institutions is accompanied by the need to record this information with appropriate tools and to make it transparent for the further promotion of Open Access (OA). Historically, many scientific libraries have used generic spreadsheet software like Excel to track OA publications and funding requests. However, data recorded in these tools is represented as free text, making data entry prone to human error that can lead to difficulties for publication and cost monitoring as well as report generation.

CODA aims to improve this process by creating dedicated linkable entities for publications, funding requests, contracts, invoices and more. Using this approach will allow for proper monitoring of publications and costs in future versions of CODA. Aditionally, CODA eventually aims to enable users to generate and export reports in various formats, e.g. OpenCost or “DFG Open Access Publication Costs” schemes.