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For a long time, the funding of innovative cooperation projects of university libraries at public universities with central funds was a desideratum. Start-up financing for university cooperation projects, including administrative projects, was provided by the calls for proposals for the Higher Education Area Structural Funding projects in 2013 and 2017, respectively, by the Federal Ministry responsible for science. Among the projects that were selected by the Federal Ministry were also five designed on the initiative of the Forum Universitätsbibliotheken Österreichs. The topics range from repositories and research data to Open Access and Open Educational Resources to procurement law for scholarly literature. The results already presented and the pro-jects still to be implemented make an important contribution to ensuring that the information infrastructure in Austria can be developed competitively and future-proof for research and teaching in a European and international context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current issue of the „Communications of the Association of Austrian Librarians“ (Mitteilungen der VÖB) is dedicated to the topic Austrian Transition to Open Access, a Higher Education Area Structural Funding project lasting 2017–2020, in which all 21 Austrian public universities are involved. The special issue includes an overview article on the project, contributions on the four subprojects and an overview of the Higher Education Structural Research projects (2014–2020) co-funded by the Federal Ministry of Science, in which libraries of the public universities have been or are involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Libraries of Austrian universities - federal universities, private universities and universities of applied sciences - as well as libraries of other research facilities cooperate in many fields. The article focuses on collaborations of facilities with a medical key aspect within the Austrian Library Network, the Austrian Academic Library Consortium and the Council of Austrian University Libraries. Furthermore infrastructure projects run by these libraries in the fields of online repositories, research data management and open access are portrayed. Finally the GMLA working group of Austrian medical librarians is introduced as an important forum for librarians of the spheres of medicine, pharmacy and public health to exchange their experiences and ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to scientific knowledge was published in October 2003. All over the world initiatives and projects were started. However, in Austria Open Access got little attention over many years. This was confirmed by a study among Austrian universities on behalf of the Council of Austrian University Libraries. Finally at the turn of the year 2012/2013 the Open Access Network Austria and the university infrastructure project E-Infrastructure Austria were started to push Open Access in Austria on a national level. So 10 years after the Berlin Declaration Austria set up the preconditions to establish sustainable Open Access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]