FWF Showcase
Ensuring Meaningful Open Access for Publicly Funded Research.
When the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) first pioneered Open Access (OA) for monographs, they encountered a critical problem: digital OA books were being buried in the darkest, most hard-to-find corners of publishers' websites. With PHAIDRA, the FWF brought these valuable resources to life, integrating them into the global OA ecosystem, and delivering more meaningful access to taxpayer-funded research for both scholars and citizens.
A Dual Responsibility
For the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), awarding research funding carries a dual responsibility. Each year, over €300m of public funds must be channelled towards the most promising, highest potential and most deserving research projects. But in return, civic society must be provided with access to the new research, knowledge and insights that it is funding.
Back in 2003, the FWF was one of the first signatories of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access. The following year, they mandated that all publicly-funded projects should publish research findings in peer-reviewed Open Access (OA) journals.
"The FWF is funded by Austrian taxpayers, and they pay for both research and the publication of that research. If publishers can then demand that citizens and public institutions — including university libraries — must pay to buy these publications back, it just doesn't seem like a very fair deal for society! We are committed to maintaining the rights of our citizens, scholars, businesses and other institutions to benefit from all research that the taxpayer has funded."
— Doris Haslinger, program manager for Humanities and Social Sciences at the FWF.
Extending Open Access to Monographs
Despite its name, the Austrian Science Fund is also responsible for funding research projects in the arts and humanities. And while OA journals are well suited for science, for much of the humanities and parts of the social sciences, the monograph is an equally significant format for publishing new studies and research. The FWF recognised that these academic books had traditionally been left behind in the wider OA discussion.
Keen to address this, in 2009 the FWF consolidated its position at the forefront of the Open Access movement, becoming one of the first funding organisations worldwide to extend its OA policy towards monographs.
Initially the FWF used incentives, offering higher funding to researchers who opted to make an Open Access version of any book available. This approach proved popular with researchers and publishers alike, so in 2011, the FWF decided to make simultaneous open access publishing of monographs a mandatory funding requirement (meaning an OA version had to be archived at the same time any book was published).
The Problem: Publisher Purgatory
Both of these early approaches relied on publishers to make the OA resources available. However, many publishers had only one or two OA books in their catalogue and, while they respected their duty to upload the OA versions to their websites, they had no incentive to promote them. As a result, valuable OA resources were being buried in the darkest, most hard-to-find corners of the publishers' websites.
"OA books were being condemned to just 'exist' in a kind of Publisher Purgatory. The publishers weren't really interested in promoting OA material or in integrating with the emerging global OA platforms," Haslinger continues.
While well-intentioned researchers were complying with OA funding requirements, the real benefits of open access to their work were still not being delivered to society. Open Access had become a tick-box exercise — books were theoretically available but practically invisible.
Taking Control: The FWF's Solution
With the clear shortcomings of a publisher-led, decentralised approach, the FWF decided to take a more proactive approach:
"For the FWF, Open Access publishing is about more than making resources theoretically available — it's about making a genuine effort to integrate research back into the society that funds it. If we want to ensure the sustainability of publicly funded research, we have to actively demonstrate value for the taxpayer, show them what research is available and help them benefit from it," explains Haslinger.
The FWF is not a technology provider. However, it does have a clear remit to deliver technology infrastructure where this is needed to implement its policy. The fund felt that while it could mandate that monographs must have an OA version freely available, it was not researchers' role or responsibility to ensure that open access to their work was effective.
So in 2011, the FWF began evaluating options for its own, more effective system for implementing OA book publishing — one that researchers could rely on. The goal for the new online publishing and archival system was to make the content more meaningfully open. Monographs should be findable: connected with search engines and, importantly, linked into the growing global OA ecosystem.
PHAIDRA: Open Source Enabling Integration
As an organisation primarily focused on managing the allocation of funding, the FWF was keen to avoid the risk and technical complexity of setting up and maintaining its own repository. For this reason, they decided to adopt an existing solution with a provider who could host the service for them. After examining a number of different third-party service offerings, this eventually led to a strategic partnership with the University of Vienna, which hosted the open source PHAIDRA repository and was actively looking to expand its partner community.
The FWF had a checklist of requirements that incorporated: technical security and trusted long-term archiving; usability and key features; alongside compliance with important industry standards. PHAIDRA ticked all these boxes, but what really set it apart was its open source architecture, which enabled something critical: integration with broader, international OA projects.
Beyond PDF: Supporting the Real Needs of Scholarship
One major advantage PHAIDRA offered over other available services was its support for archiving a broad range of content formats beyond standard PDFs.
This was not just a nice-to-have feature. The FWF was funding monographs in fields such as musicology, film and media studies and performance arts — research that came with accompanying CDs, DVDs, audio files and video content. These weren't supplementary materials; they were integral to the scholarship itself. A musicology monograph analyzing performance techniques has limited value without the audio examples. An ethnographic study of ritual practices loses critical context without the video documentation.
PHAIDRA's ability to handle multimedia content meant the FWF could support modern, digitally-native scholarship rather than forcing researchers into a PDF-only straightjacket.
The Integration Advantage
But the real differentiator for PHAIDRA was its ease of integration. Because PHAIDRA is open source, the team at Vienna could customize and extend it to connect with other platforms — even integrating with alternative services that the FWF was considering. This delivered a "both/and" solution rather than forcing an either/or choice.
OAPEN Integration: When FWF chose PHAIDRA, integration with the OAPEN global library of scholarly books was an essential requirement. For the support team at Vienna University, it was quick and simple to implement specific customization to make this work. PHAIDRA's open, extensible architecture made it straightforward to include the necessary metadata systems (initially BIC codes, later Thema codes) required by OAPEN to classify and harvest the books effectively.
OpenAIRE: PHAIDRA's existing integration with OpenAIRE provided an additional bonus for FWF. OpenAIRE is one of the top global platforms for Open Access discovery — it is a default destination for researchers, institutions, and members of the public looking for OA materials. Integration with OpenAIRE is increasingly vital for FWF projects within the EU context, but more importantly, it ensures FWF monographs are genuinely discoverable as part of the global OA ecosystem.
PHAIDRA's open architecture and the Vienna team's willingness to build these integrations meant the FWF could move beyond both the old publisher model (where books were isolated on individual publisher websites) and beyond a single-platform approach (which would have limited discoverability). Instead, FWF books became nodes in a connected network — findable through multiple pathways, accessible through international platforms, and properly integrated into the infrastructure where Open Access actually happens.
Key Benefits Delivered by PHAIDRA
By leveraging PHAIDRA's integration capabilities, the FWF transformed its policy commitment into genuine global academic visibility. Books that would have languished in the furthest corners of publisher websites are now discoverable through international platforms, search engines, and the broader Open Access ecosystem.
Funded research projects are still free to choose their own OA publishing mechanism. But the FWF ebook library now offers researchers a simple, assured way to publish monographs as a meaningful part of the global OA ecosystem. Offering far more than tick-box compliance, PHAIDRA ensures that both ebooks and supporting multimedia are findable and accessible, rather than just available somewhere.
The Vienna University team provided secure, reliable hosting for FWF and even built the custom OAPEN integration to meet its specific requirements. But PHAIDRA itself also came with the team's valuable expertise in research data management embedded in the product: OpenAIRE integration came built-in, standards compliance was automatic, and search engine optimization was designed into the architecture. FWF gained access to a repository engineered for genuine discoverability in the global OA ecosystem — not just a place to store files.
Finally, for society in Austria and beyond, PHAIDRA has ensured that the FWF can deliver on its full remit: returning the benefits of research to the people, businesses and other institutions that funded it.