Donations

Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics provides world-class infrastructures—its seminar center, its open access publishing services, and the dblp computer science bibliography—as non-profit services and as a common good to the international computer science community. This is made possible by public funding from the German federal and state governments.

Due to the recent increase in operating costs of open research infrastructures, which is due to wage increases, higher energy prices and other reasons, it is becoming increasingly difficult to make ends meet. Public funding is not able to cover all these increases.

This is why we humbly ask for your support in the form of a donation to Schloss Dagstuhl LZI. Even just a small contribution can make a difference. Thank you very much!

While Schloss Dagstuhl received—and will continue to receive—public funding, the rising costs are placing significant pressure on our ability to maintain and expand our services. Here is a breakdown of some of the challenges we are facing:

• With the rising global energy prices, our annual utility costs have increased by over 35% when compared to the utility cost in 2019, adding an additional €XXXXXX to the operational expenses of our facilities and web service infrastructures.
• The cost of essential goods and services—ranging from office supplies, technical equipment and contracted services—have increased by an average of 20% when compared to 2019, adding an extra €XXXXXX to our yearly expenses.
• Life has become more expensive for everybody in the past few years, so naturally the wages of our staff had to increase as well. As the expenses of the dblp team are dominated by personnel cost, this has hit our budget particularly hard. Wages have seen an adjustment of additional 18% when compared to 2019. For essentially the same number of employees, our annual personnel costs have since risen by more than €XXXXXX.

Together, these growing expenses outpace our public funding, which has remained relatively stable. When compared to 2019, the German federal and state governments have only been able to provide a budget increase of less than 10%, leaving us with a gap of €XXXXXX for the operational cost for the dblp computer science bibliography in 2025.

Your donation will directly support the operation of the dblp computer science bibliography.

Schloss Dagstuhl is committed to keeping dblp a free and open service for and a public good of the global computer science community. Your support ensures that financial barriers won’t limit researchers’ access to this vital resource. Every contribution helps us maintain and enhance dblp.

Here are some examples how your generous support will make an impact:

• The dblp indexing process consists of a series of quality control and semantic enrichment steps based on the intellectual work of human editors. Even though our editorial team has remained the same size since 2019, we’ve already increased the number of indexed records per year by more than 25%. To improve on that even further, we need to hire and train new editorial staff.
• We do not just add new data; the dblp team is continuously improving the metadata’s quality and its reliability by monitoring the database for errors, fixing incorrect authorship assignments, and updating of the directory of journals and conference series. We are already resolving more than 75,000 error cases per year, and there is still a lot more to do.
• Less editorial workload for dblp’s scientific staff means more focus on developing new tools, such as our recent SPARQL query service. Your contribution will drive the enhancement of our services and the development of new features for the community.

All donations are handled independently of and are not disclosed to the scientific and editorial staff in order to protect the integrity of dblp’s editorial decision process.

We would certainly appreciate your kind support.

To get in touch with us and discuss an institutional sponsorship, please contact our Technical Administrative Director:

• Heike Meißner
  Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics
  Oktavie-Allee
  66687 Wadern
  Germany
  heike.meissner@dagstuhl.de