Forschungszentrum Jülich offers its employees a broad internal training program, which is revised annually and published at the beginning of each year. The Central Library participates in this program, offering training courses in information literacy and publishing literacy [ 11 ] in response to the changing role of the library [ 12 14 ]. The spectrum of training courses for 2017 in the fields of publishing literacy and open access was expanded and redesigned. 2 The strategic objectives behind this project on new open access training courses were to close existing knowledge gaps, to reduce individual and thus time-consuming consultations and to raise the awareness among scientists of open access and scientific publishing. Based on the description of the initial situation and a stakeholder analysis, the following sections will highlight the gaps and problems in the 2016 training program, present the detailed project goals for 2017 and describe the concrete solution and training courses offered.

2.1. Initial Situation

The training courses offered by the Central Library of Forschungszentrum Jülich in 2016 comprised a total of 26 training courses. Sixteen of these training courses can be assigned to the field of information literacy and seven to the field of publishing literacy. The three remaining training courses do not fall under these categories and included, among other things, a workshop for administrative staff working in institute libraries.

Two of the seven courses in the field of publishing literacy dealt with bibliometric aspects, two with literature management programs and three with the writing and publishing of scientific papers. Two of the latter three training courses took three hours each and only marginally touched upon the subject of open access. The remaining training course was one hour long, focused exclusively on open access and the related services offered by the Central Library and was called “Open Access”. One of the issues of the 2016 training program regarding open access was the focus on that single training course. This approach failed to recognize that many scientists are not aware of what open access is, how it affects them and why they should deal with it. In brief, there was a lack of scientific context. A separate training course entitled “Open Access” is therefore unattractive for scientists and does not explain the benefits for them because it is not related to the research circle [ 16 ]. Furthermore, this course failed to address administrative staff or scientific coordinators in the research institutes. They also have to deal with open access and often have practical questions, but are deterred by too much theory. Additionally, with only a single training course per year, new developments and questions that arise repeatedly during the consultation process cannot be promptly incorporated into the annual training course and must instead be answered anew on an individual basis. This is very time-consuming.

The individual author consultations have already led to a continuous enhancement of the information presented on the intranet of Forschungszentrum Jülich in the past, e.g., new FAQs or a detailed description of the difference between green and gold open access. Instead of only using this up-to-date link between questions of authors and information services of the Central Library on the intranet, this project aims to incorporate this information quickly and directly into the training courses throughout the year.

The strategic goals of revising the training program were to expand the range of training courses in the field of open access in order to close the existing gaps, to reduce the individual support effort, to link the term open access to the research cycle and to impart the most important competences in the field of scientific publishing to the scientists of Forschungszentrum Jülich. The objectives were to develop training ideas and content and to ensure that the course instructors were the librarians directly involved in scientific publishing. The project on new open access training courses did not include a special evaluation of the training courses since standard evaluations of courses that are part of the official training program are performed by the Human Resources Development Department of Forschungszentrum Jülich.