As part of its digital strategy the state of Rhineland-Palatinate has decided to set up a digital state portal on cultural heritage, via which digital copies of Rhineland-Palatinate's cultural heritage can be made available and showcased. The project, funded by the Ministry of Family Affairs, Women, Culture and Integration, intends to increase the scope, visibility and use of the cultural heritage of Rhineland-Palatinate and the institutions that preserve it, across disciplines and thereby fulfils the function of a central entry point for access to the digitally existing and digitizes cultural heritage from and in relation to Rhineland-Platinate. To begin with, the portal forms two central functional pillars: on the one hand, a searchable stock of digital objects and metadata describing them of the various institutions, which can be faceted and searched according to different points of view and explored in different ways. By means of an overarching metadata schema, the digital objects from archives, museums, libraries and other cultural heritage institutions are aggregated, enriched and networked with each other. A platform for virtual exhibitions creates the opportunity to enable exciting access to this heterogeneous collection through thematic deep dives. In addition, the portal will act as an aggregator for supra-regional cultural heritage portals such as the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek and Europeana.

The German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) supports the development of Open Access in order to aid open and research-friendly communication in the sciences.

Via the DFG funding program “Open Access Publication Funding”, a fixed allowance for the Open Access publication of scientific results will be granted for the publication years 2022–2024. Open Access plays a pivotal role in improving scientific communication, and the publication costs should therefore be determined with regard to this. The main aim of this funding program is therefore to achieve structural adjustments in financial flows, thus enabling the transformation towards Open Access and improving transparency regarding the costs for Open Access publication of research results.

In the course of this development, DFG calls for centralized management of publication resources at the library as a central location and for the establishment of structures to be able to determine the number and costs of publications as automatically and standardized as possible.

To reduce costs and to simplify administrative processes for scientists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and University Medical Center Mainz, the University Library participates in contracts with numerous publishers. An overview of the contracts as well as the current funding conditions can be found on our Open Access page.

The Mainz Science Foundation is funding the purchase of a total of three large-format display cases for the JGU collections. With around 30 research and teaching collections JGU Mainz has a fascinating variety of scientific objects. These include fossils millions of years old, manuscripts of German Romanticism, Paleolithic tools, recordings of African music, medical instruments, casts of ancient Egyptian sculptures, mathematical models, hymnals from the 17th century and much more.
The collections are primarily used for research and teaching, which is why they are rarely open to the public. For the first time, Mainz University Library is making it possible for the University Library to present its collections together and permanently on campus.
The collection showcase and the associated AMA Lounge will be open to the public from winter semester 2023/24 in the transition area between ZB and GFG.

The research project "Counter-hegemonic voices in the music archive" (KOSTIMA): political readings, contextualizations and contemporary references" (funding code 01UQ2304A) is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in the funding line "Networking – Indexing – Researching. Alliance for University Collections II". The joint project is coordinated by the University Library of JGU Mainz and plans to catalog and research the collections of the African Music Archive (AMA) in Mainz, the European Center for Jewish Music (EZJM) in Hanover, and the Center for World Music (CWM) in Hildesheim. Central to the investigation of the musical archive material is the question of the counter-hegemonic messages contained therein and their location in social contexts.

The focus of the Mainz sub-project is on song lyrics of Congolese music from the AMA. These reflect a period of diverse political upheaval in the Congo under the authoritarian regime of President Mobutu. The perspective of a wide variety of artists handed down here includes various forms of subtle political communication that are often hidden and encoded – and have not yet been analyzed in detail. This is where the project comes in, using cognitive and structural linguistic methods to investigate strategies for inscribed political content into song lyrics and their intertextuality. Central to the music ethnological-African subproject is the question of the extent to which social reality and politics are not only depicted in texts by Congolese artists, but also how these texts also indirectly and subversively shape politics and how overarching social dynamics are implicitly interwoven through texts.
 
The research results will be published open-access and communicated to the general public via multilingual Scrollytelling and a travelling exhibition.

Runtime: 2023-2027

In recent years, Open Science has become considerably more important for young scientists. By facilitating access to research data, publications and collaborative networks, the dissemination of knowledge is accelerated and innovative collaboration is promoted. The increased transparency and reproducibility of research results also contribute to improving the quality and credibility of scientific work.

The Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and its institutions actively support this open scientific culture. The University Library (UB) offers resources and infrastructure to promote Open Science and, since September 2024, has been developing continuing education programs specifically tailored to young researchers. By establishing a new position in the field of Open Science, the Academic Integrity Competence Center (AkIn) plans to develop a comprehensive mediation program.

This program, which is based on the central principles of Open Science, will combine self-study phases with classroom-based events and will be supported by a variety of learning materials.
First, the term Open Science will be explained and its various facets examined in order to create a basic understanding. In this way, young researchers are gradually introduced to the concepts of open science and prepared for the requirements of transparent and collaborative research.