University of Bremen: SuUB awarded the Open Library Badge

The State and University Library (SuUB) Bremen is convinced of the importance of open offers for users, science and the public. It has therefore committed itself to the openness criteria. The Open Library Badge (OLB) initiative has now awarded her the Open Library Badge for this.
When people talk about “openness” in connection with libraries, many people certainly think first of the library doors that are open to everyone. But openness stands for much more here, for example for:

• Open Access: free access to scientific literature
• Open Educational Resources: freely usable teaching and learning materials
• Open Data: open and freely usable data
• Open Source: software whose source text can be used and modified freely
• Open Science: an open science in general

“It is our goal to meet the digital needs of current and future generations alike. The social benefit is maximum when the digital resources are accessible to the greatest number of people and can be reused with a minimum of technical, legal and social restrictions,” says Maria Elisabeth Müller, the director of SuUB. “That’s why we have committed ourselves to the demands of openness – for example free access to knowledge through Open Access.”

This openness is intended to create visibility, reproducibility and transparency of research results. In general, the concept of openness is also about the participation and involvement of all interested parties (citizen science, accessibility).

The Open Library Badge (OLB) initiative was founded in 2016 to draw even more attention to the issue of “openness” in libraries and to show where and at which libraries openness is particularly important. This badge is intended to create an incentive system for more openness in libraries and as a reward for their commitment to more openness in science and society. “We are proud to have been holders of the ‘Open Library Badge 2020’ since last week. This means that we are one of a total of 21 libraries from Germany, Switzerland and Austria that have committed themselves to openness criteria,” says SuUB Director Müller.

Also this year, the SuUB is participating in the international Open Access Week from October 24th to 30th, 2022. From October 24th to 28th, 2022 at 12 noon, it will offer digital coffee lectures on the topic of Open Access – free and open to all.