20 November 2020
In the beginning of 2021 zbMATH will be transformed into an open access platform. This service, which has been subject to a charge up to now, will thus be available free of charge to all interested persons worldwide. The change in the business model will make it possible to use most information and data of zbMATH freely for research purposes and for linking to other non-commercial services.
Mathematics was and still is both the driving force behind and beneficiary of digitization. Scientists now use digital platforms for collaborative work as well as for disseminating mathematical knowledge and discussing research results. zbMATH (formerly Zentralblatt für Mathematik) has been serving as such a platform for a long time. It offers a comprehensive service with information about mathematical publications, authors, references and software. However, the reusability of this data and the possibilities of networking it were severely limited by the previous licensing model.
Therefore, the Joint Science Conference of the Federal Government and the federal states decided in 2019 to support the transformation of zbMATH into an open access platform. At present, the publishers of zbMATH – FIZ Karlsruhe, the European Mathematical Society (EMS) and Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften – stipulate this model in a new publisher’s agreement. In addition, the contracts governing existing collaborations with publishing houses will be renewed and the terms of use and reviewer conditions will be adapted.
The extensive preparatory work is nearing completion. From 2021, as scheduled, the information service zbMATH with all its content will be freely accessible and also more strongly networked. Open interfaces will enable the integration of other services, e.g., better search functions for full texts from free digital libraries such as arXiv and EuDML. A further dimension of new applications is offered by the linkage with mathematical research data, which so far have been largely isolated and poorly developed.
Prof. Dr. Klaus Hulek, Editor in Chief of zbMATH, points out: “Opening zbMATH as an open access platform provides much added value for the scientific community. The increasing networking of zbMATH with other services will open up new research opportunities. This will generate great potential for innovation“.
The next steps
Since creating an open platform for the entirety of all mathematical research data is a task that goes far beyond the scope of zbMATH Open, FIZ Karlsruhe will initially integrate data sets that are already technically mature into zbMATH and make them available for further networked activities. One example is swMATH, the information service for mathematical software. Other important sources for mathematical research are DLMF (NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions), a library of mathematical reference data for special functions and their applications, and the English-language database OEIS (Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences). Work to link zbMATH Open with both data collections is already underway.
More information is available on the zbMATH product website www.zbmath.org
and on our website www.fiz-karlsruhe.de.