Together with many other universities worldwide, the University of Göttingen has aimed to unlock the full potential of networked digital scientific communication by strengthening open access as early as the late 1990s. Open science policies at the institutional level consequently followed and have been with us for over a decade. However, for several reasons, their adoption often is still far from complete when it comes to the practices of researchers or research groups. To improve this situation at our university, there is dedicated support at the infrastructural level: the university library collaborates with several campus units in developing and running services, activities and projects in support of open access and open science. This article outlines our main activity areas and aligns them with the overall rationale to reach higher uptake and acceptance of open science practice at the university. The mentioned examples of our activities highlight how we seek to advance open science along the needs and perspectives of diverse audiences and by running it as a multi-stakeholder endeavor. Therefore, our activities involve library colleagues with diverse backgrounds, faculty and early career researchers, research managers, as well as project and infrastructure staff. We conclude with a summary of achievements and challenges to be faced.

In the light of new digital production and dissemination practices, the scholarly publishing system has seen significant and also disruptive changes, especially in STM (science, technology and medicine) and with regard to the predominant format "journal article." The digital transformation also holds true for those disciplines that continue to rely on the scholarly monograph as a publication format and means for reputation building, namely the Humanities and the Social Sciences with a qualitative approach (HSS). In our paper we analyse the reasons why the monograph has not yet reached its full potential in the digital paradigm, especially in the uptake of Open Access and innovative publishing options. We highlight some of the principal underlying factors for this, and suggest how especially practices, now more widespread in HSS but arising from the Digital Humanities, could play a role in moving forward the rich digitality of the scholarly monograph.

There are 33 university presses in Germany, most of them part of the working group of German‐language university presses, AG Universitätsverlage. Göttingen University Press was formed in the late 1990s as an open access service for the university's scholars. A publishing house within the academic network is able to be more responsive to the needs of its institution and scholars than an external publisher solely relying on revenues. Taking control of publishing helps academia ensure that results will be disseminated in a way most beneficial to itself and society.

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Many academic libraries have embraced an active publishing role in recent years, an important component in libraries’ efforts to address mounting pressures throughout the scholarly communications cycle. Libraries in the United States and Germany have been especially assertive in this arena. This article focuses on one particular aspect of libraries’ publishing efforts in Germany and the U. S.: interventions to make the production and dissemination of the scholarly book (in print and electronic formats) more economically sustainable and its content more open. This article discusses the role of the scholarly book for early-career researchers in the humanities and social sciences and reflects on intercontinental differences. The article considers the library efforts in the context of broader, university-based publishing activities in both national contexts, particularly the relationship of library publishing and university presses. The authors discuss how differences and commonalities between the academic and economic contexts in the U. S. and Germany have led to institutional responses that diverge and converge in significant ways and they suggest that such a comparison can usefully inform scholarly communications strategies in both countries. The article considers broad national trends and also draws on examples from the authors’ home institutions: the State and University Library at Göttingen and Cornell University Library in Ithaca, New York.