DeepGreen—A Data Hub for the Distribution of Scholarly Articles From Publishers to Open Access Repositories in Germany

DeepGreen is an automated delivery service for open access articles. Originally conceived to take advantage of the so-called open access component—a secondary publication right in Alliance and National licences in Germany to promote green open access—it aims to streamline open access processes by automating the distribution of full-text articles and metadata from publishers to repositories. The service, developed by a consortium and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) in its initial phase, has successfully established itself as a national service, facilitating open access content distribution and contributing to Germany's open access infrastructure. As of December 2024, DeepGreen distributes articles from 14 publishers to 84 institutional repositories and 6 subject-specific repositories. This article describes the role of the DeepGreen service in Germany, its collaboration with publishers and the potential of automated processes for storing articles in open access repositories, which, as publicly owned institutional infrastructures, ensure sustainable access and provide secure, redundant storage.