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What is Open Access? Find an introduction here. Source: based on Brinken, H. (2021). 10 Gründe für Open Access. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4643859 ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Open Access: Pros and Cons Find arguments and reservations here. Open Access Publishing and Self-Archiving Find an introduction here. Perception of Open Access Survey on requirements and obstacles in the legal sciences. Open Access in Legal Scholarship The field of legal scholarship was comparatively late in recognising the relevance of open access for its own scientific practice. Admittedly, since the turn of the century, legal scholars have addressed the legal parameters of open access ( Spindler, 2006 ) and have examined in dissertations the significance of copyright’s exclusionary power for the supply of scientific information ( Krujatz, 2012 ) and in journal articles the backdoor to more open access offered by copyright law ( Radtke, 2022 ). There are even journals, such as RuZ – Recht und Zugang , that are specifically dedicated to legal issues relating to access to cultural heritage. And between 2015 and 2024, open access was the subject of legislation in six German federal states. However, when it comes to their own publishing practices, many legal scholars react to the topic of open access with a questioning look or a shrug of the shoulders. Others even reject it outright, which can lead to years of legal disputes . There are a variety of reasons for this – at least eight theses against open access in legal scholarship , which have since been called into question, are frequently advanced ( Hamann & Hürlimann, 2019 ). Open access is increasingly mandated by funders of legal science research and by universities (“top down”). In recent years, however, jurOA-Netzwerk , an informal network of legal scholars and librarians in the German-speaking area, has been working to promote open access in legal scholarship (“bottom up”). This network operates a mailing list that reports news on open access in legal scholarship. Since 2016, it has organised biennial conferences –the fifth of which took place in 2024 – that are documented on www.jurOA.de . By contrast, the established professional societies in the field of legal scholarship have so far been reluctant to participate in the open access debate. In its Criteria for the Assessment of Scholarly Performance in the Field of Private Law, the German Association of Teachers of Private Law (Zivilrechtslehrervereinigung) defines “successful reception” as a performance criterion and designates the publication venue as an indicator for scientific quality. However, this does not appear to be linked to any statements regarding the accessibility or reusability of publications. In the guidelines for good scientific practice issued by the German Association of Teachers of Private Law (Zivilrechtslehrervereinigung) and the German Association of Teachers of Public Law (Vereinigung der deutschen Staatsrechtsrechtslehrer) , there is no mention of open access. The Swiss Association of Jurists (Schweizerischer Juristenverein) has been pressured by the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences guidelines for granting financial contributions to publications to take small steps in the direction of open access. Journals As of October 2024, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listed 860 entries under “Law “. However, this number is exaggerated, as the disciplinary assignment of journals in DOAJ is often misleading, and, on the other hand, many online law journals – both from the German-speaking area (Hamann, 2016, para 24) and the USA (Severin et al., 2020, p.16) – are not indexed. Specifically, a study conducted in 2019 found that, as of 1 August of that year, three of the 11 law journals from the German-speaking area indexed in DOAJ were assigned to the wrong subject or geographical area, while a further 39 online law journals were not included at all ( Hamann, 2019, p. 87, Footnote 11, pp. 90–92 ). Journals are indexed in DOAJ on application only . The application procedure is very laborious, and even professional publishers – and especially many smaller (scholar-led) journals – are unable to meet all the criteria for inclusion. Of the law journals from the German-speaking area (DE/AT/CH/LI) that are indexed in DOAJ, only one – the International Journal of Language & Law – is also a member of the Free Journal Network of even more critically curated platinum open access journals. In the case of other journals, membership is often precluded because FJN requires that member journals include a title and abstract in English for each published article. The most established law journals from the German-speaking area that are indexed in DOAJ include: German Law Journal (since 2000, now published in the UK) Rechtsgeschichte – Legal History (online since 2002) Ancilla Iuris: Lagen des Rechts (since 2006) Göttingen Journal of International Law (since 2009) International Journal of Language & Law (since 2012) Recht in Afrika / Law in Africa / Droit en Afrique (online since 2014) sui-generis (since 2014) In addition, as of 31.12.2022, there were a further 10 open access law journals from the German-speaking area ( Hamann, 2023 , p. 416). This number increased by two in 2024, when the renowned journals RabelsZ ( The Rabel Journal of Comparative and International Private Law ) and ZGE ( Intellectual Property Journal ) were converted to open access within the framework of a pioneering subscribe-to-open (S2O) project at Mohr Siebeck . The further spread of this funding model, which was established only in 2017, means that further conversions of journals to open access can be expected. Besides genuinely open access journals, whose articles are published under an open licence (such as a Creative Commons CC BY or CC BY-SA licence), there are numerous online law journals that (a) distribute their content primarily on the Internet (i.e. in parallel with the print version) rather than just secondarily (i.e. some time after publication of the primary print version), and (b) make the full-text versions of their articles freely accessible, that is, accessible without special access data (Hamann 2019, p. 88). In Figure 1, each online law journal in the German-speaking area that existed as of 2022 is represented by a coloured square. Three groups can be distinguished: 16 genuinely open access journals, that is, journals whose articles were published under an open licence (top left, in orange, framed in red); 15 journals with more legally restrictive licences (top right, in grey); and 28 journals with traditional rights distribution (“free to read”, bottom half of the figure, in green). Figure 1. Licensing models of the online law journals in the German-speaking area as of 2022. Source (including explanation of the individual abbreviations): Hamann, 2023 : 418; CC BY 4.0 International . In addition to journals explicitly published under a Creative Commons (CC) or Digital Peer Publishing (DPP) licence, some of these journals describe themselves simply as open access (“OA”), whereas others either do not supply any information about the distribution of rights (“…”) or invoke the statutory distribution of rights (“UrhG” [German Copyright Act], in some cases using the © symbol). Figure 2. Year of establishment and country of origin of 47 online law journals from Germany (DE), Switzerland (CH), Austria (AU), and Liechtenstein (LI). Source: Hamann, 2019 : 94; CC BY 4.0 International As of 01.10.2024, the Zenodo collection “Daten zum Open Access in der deutschsprachigen Rechtswissenschaft” [Data on Open Access in German-Language Legal Scholarship], the most current list of online law journals in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Lichtenstein, comprised a list of the 71 journals (incl. seven that have ceased publication). The oldest journals have been online since 1996; the years 2013/14 saw a particularly strong wave of start-ups (see Figure 2). Because the start-ups are offset by journals that ceased publication, it is possible to determine how many online journals were in existence each year since 1996. As can be seen in Figure 3, the development curve rose steeply up to 2022. However, it also flattened in the last years of that period, and it is unclear whether this indicates a trend. Figure 3. Number of online law journals in the German-speaking area in the period 1996–2022. Source: Hamann, 2023 : 417; CC BY 4.0 International Outside the German-speaking area, the law reviews published by university presses in the United States, which are usually freely available online, constitute a flourishing eco-system of open access scholarly texts. The origins of these law reviews go back a long way – for example, to the popular repository infrastructure of the Berkeley Electronic Press (Bepress). Many of the student-edited journals in this eco-system still do not use any open access licences and can therefore be classified as gratis open access rather than libre open access . What are Open Access Journals? Find an introduction here. Practical Tip Publishing Open Access: How to evaluate a journal's quality Video on the Funding of Open Access Articles Source: Becklas Dorow, C., Hauss, J. (2026). Funding Open Access Articles – What Are the Options?. Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB), open-access.network. https://doi.org/10.5446/73596 ( CC BY 3.0 DE ) open-access.network (2026) ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Open Access Helpdesk You are welcome to contact our Helpdesk of you have any questions about Open Access. Practical Tip Finding Open Access Literature (in German) oa.finder The oa.finder shows you from tens of thousands of journals which are Gold Open Access, whether they charge APCs and how high these are. You can also view the funding modalities of your own institution. Academic Blogs In addition to scholarly journals, academic blogs increasingly also serve as serious forums for legal scholarship. Apart from the personal blogs of individual pioneers such as Ulrich Noack (“ Unternehmensrechtliche Notizen ” 2003–2022), multi-author blogs in particular have become established, whose content is made available mostly under different variants of CC licenses. Important examples include: Rechtswirklichkeit – the blog of the Berliner Arbeitskreis Rechtswirklichkeit (ISSN 2366-3022), since 2000 Umweltrechtsblog – the blog of the Verein zur Förderung von Information für die breite Öffentlichkeit im Umweltrecht, since 2007 Verfassungsblog – On Matters Constitutional (ISSN 2366-7044), since 2009 HHR – Humanitarianism & Human Rights (ISSN 2199-0859), since 2013 JuWissBlog – the blog of the association Junge Wissenschaft im Öffentlichen Recht (ISSN 2567-2754), since 2013 Völkerrechtsblog – the blog of the Arbeitskreis junger Völkerrechtswissenschaftler (ISSN 2510-2567), since 2014 D’Kart – an antitrust blog of the Institute for Antitrust Law (IKartR) of the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, since 2017 Rechts|Empirie – Legal Empirics in Europe, since 2019 These blogs are used not only for science communication but increasingly also as platforms for the primary publication of short contributions with highly topical content and at the same time high academic standards. Open Educational Resources (OER) Open access in the area of legal monographs is currently experiencing its greatest upswing in the context of open educational resources (OER) (see Chiofalo & Milas, 2023). In 2017, Deutsche Straftheorie , a textbook on German criminal theory, was published in open access via Refubium, the repository of Freie Universität Berlin. And in 2018, the first OER textbook on Swiss law, entitled Introduction to Swiss Law , was published by Carl Grossman Verlag. Since then, great progress in the dissemination and acceptance of OER has been made primarily by didactic projects in the area of public law. Particularly noteworthy here are (a) the collaboratively produced textbooks of the association for legal scholarship OpenRewi on numerous topics such as administrative law, constitutional law, state organisation law, fundamental rights, asylum law, international law, and freedom of information law; and (b) Smartbook Grundrechte , a hybrid textbook with 67 instructional videos, which is co-authored by Emanuel V. Towfigh, professor of public law at EBS Law School, and Alexander Gleixner and was published in 2022 by Nomos Verlag. Monographs The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and the OAPEN Library list law books in various subject classifications, which cannot be searched collectively. These include (as of April 2024 for DOAB and as of October 2024 for OAPEN): law (2,582 titles in the DOAB , 1,416 titles in OAPEN ) jurisprudence (235 titles in the DOAB , 229 in OAPEN ) legal (263 titles in the DOAB , 218 in OAPEN ) courts (3 titles in the DOAB , 19 in OAPEN ) Thus, across these categories, the two databases together list almost 5,000 legal books (multiple counts and overlooked categories cannot be ruled out). Because of the disparate categorisation, a more exact breakdown by publisher, year of publication, etc. would require a more in-depth empirical study. The pioneers of open access monographs in the field of legal scholarship were not the established scholarly publishers but rather private individuals and societal initiatives. They include, for example, the Mannheim solicitor Thomas Fuchs, whose essays and volumes are published on DeLegibus.com (since 1998); the online portal jurawelt.com with the law series TENEA (115 monographs 2002–2008); and Mark Schweizer, who self-published his dissertation online in 2005 (he later went on to become president of the Swiss Federal Patent Court). The first dedicated open access law publishers – at least in the German-speaking area – were probably Carl Grossmann Verlag in Germany (since 2016) and sui generis Verlag in Switzerland (since 2019). In 2024, Carl Grossmann Verlag published what was likely the first open access commentary in German jurisprudence ( Boehm et al., 2024 ), and between 2018 and October 2024, sui generis Verlag published 55 monographs . The Verein für Recht und Digitalisierung e.V. (VRD) has been promoting open access since 2021, with two dedicated open access series under the brand digital|recht ( Jüngels, 2023 ) – namely the “Schriften zum Immaterialgüter-, IT-, Medien-, Daten- und Wettbewerbsrecht” ( 20 volumes as of October 2024) and “Staat und digitale Gesellschaft” ( 6 volumes as of October 2024). After the open access model was also discovered by established publishing houses, the university press Universitätsverlag Göttingen was one of the earliest and most committed publishers with a legal publishing programme. Another was Nomos-Verlag in Baden-Baden; as of October 2024, the Nomos eLibrary listed 275 open access books. More conservative publishers also have open access monographs in their portfolios. They include, for example, Mohr Siebeck, with 204 titles , and Duncker & Humblot, with 74 titles (as of October 2024). Verlag C. H. Beck, the dominant publisher of German-language law books, has so far limited itself to making a digital version of the renowned print commentary “ Grundgesetz für jeden ” (Basic Law for Everyone) freely available online in 2024 – albeit not under an open licence. What are Open Access Books? Find an introduction here. open-access.network (2026) ( CC BY 4.0 International ) open-access.network ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Disciplin­ary Reposi­tories Disciplinary repositories have played a limited role in the field of legal scholarship to date. The few law repositories in existence include: 2 Dok (pronounced "Inter-Zwei-Dok"): This open access law repository of the Specialised Information Service for International and Interdisciplinary Legal Research (Fachinformationsdienst für internationale und interdisziplinäre Rechtsforschung) at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin is open to all legal scholars. Besides scholarly publications and research data , it also archives blog posts . SSOAR (Social Science Open Access Repository) : This full-text server maintained and operated by GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences serves five “communities”, including Jurisprudence and Administrative Sciences with over 3,000 archived documents (as of October 2024). LawArXiv : Established with the intention of creating an open access community for legal scholarship, this preprint repository was closed after accepting 1,390 documents. It no longer accepts new submissions, and the number of archived documents has since shrunk to 160. Fachrepositorium zum Schweizer Recht [Disciplinary repository on Swiss law]: Run by a non-profit association in Switzerland and supported by the Faculty of Law at the University of Zurich, Repositorium.ch offers free accessibility, a semantic search functionality, and an open API. However, it does not disclose the number of archived media. Because disciplinary repositories of legal scholarship are few and far between, general repositories such as Zenodo are often used for legal research data and publications. The Open Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) provides an overview of relevant repositories. What are Repositories? Find an introduction here. Legal Aspects Find an introduction here. Video über das Zeitveröffentlichungsrecht Quelle: Brehm, E. (2021). Zweitveröffentlichungsrecht für Wissenschaftler*innen, open-access.network. https://doi.org/10.5446/51789 ( CC BY 3.0 DE ) References Boehm, F., Euler, E., Klimpel, P., Rack, F., & Weitzmann, J. (2024). Creative Commons Public License (CCPL) – Kommentar und Handbuch für die Rechtspraxis . Carl Grossmann Verlag. https://openrewi.org/creative-commons-public-license-ccpl Chiofalo, V., Milas M. (2023). Die geschlossene Gesellschaft der Rechtswissenschaft: Chancen und Grenzen von Open Educational Resources, ZDRW – Zeitschrift für Didaktik der Rechtswissenschaft 10 , 168–187. https://doi.org/10.5771/2196-7261-2023-2 Hamann, H. (2016). Freier Zugang zur juristischen Fachliteratur im Spiegel der Open-Science-Bewegung. sui generis – die juristische Open-Access-Zeitschrift , 96–104. https://doi.org/10.21257/sg.28 Hamann, H. (2019). Lizenzmodelle juristischer Internetzeitschriften: Zur vernachlässigten normativen Dimension des "Open Access". Sonderheft der RW – Zeitschrift für rechtswissenschaftliche Forschung , 85–111. https://doi.org/10.5771/9783748903659-91 Hamann, H. (2023). Urheberrecht als Ermöglichungsinfrastruktur für Open-Access-Publikationen? ZUM – Zeitschrift für Urheber- und Medienrecht 67 , 410–419. https://hanjo.1hamann.de/research/zum2023-410.pdf Hamann, H., & Hürlimann, D. (2019). Open Access bei der Veröffentlichung rechtswissenschaftlicher Fachliteratur – was soll das? Sonderheft der RW – Zeitschrift für rechtswissenschaftliche Forschung, 3–30. https://doi.org/10.5771/9783748903659-9 Krujatz, S. (2012). Open Access. Der offene Zugang zu wissenschaftlichen Informationen und die ökonomische Bedeutung urheberrechtlicher Ausschlussmacht für die wissenschaftliche Informationsversorgung . Mohr Siebeck. https://www.mohrsiebeck.com/buch/open-access-9783161519987 Radtke, T. (2022), Die Hintertür zu mehr Open Access? GRUR – Gewerblicher Rechtsschutz und Urheberrecht 124 , 1562–1568. https://radtke.cc/publikationen/GRUR2022,1562.pdf Severin, A., Egger, M., Eve, M. P., & Hürlimann, D. (2020). Discipline-specific open access publishing practices and barriers to change: An evidence-based review. F1000Research . https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.17328.2 Spindler, G. (Ed.) (2006). Rechtliche Rahmenbedingungen von Open Access-Publikationen . Universitätsverlag Göttingen. https://doi.org/10.17875/gup2006-115 Further Reading Contributions by Rux, J., Hamann, H., Lauber-Rönsberg, A., & Hotz, T. (2023). In: IUM (Ed.), Open Access und das Urheberrecht – Eine komplizierte Beziehung? Symposium of the Institut für Urheber- und Medienrecht on 10.2.2023 in Munich. ZUM – Zeitschrift für Urheber- und Medienrecht 67 [Special Issue], 405–427 Fischer, G. (2022). Im Ringen um Erkenntnis und Anerkennung: Wie Rechtswissenschaftler*innen das eigene akademische Publizieren im Zuge von Open Access sehen. RuZ – Recht und Zugang 3 , 19–49. https://doi.org/10.5771/2699-1284-2022-1-19 Euler, E. (2020). Open Access in der Wissenschaft und die Realitäten des Rechts. RuZ – Recht und Zugang 1 , 56–82. https://doi.org/10.5771/2699-1284-2020-1-56 Hamann, H., & Hürlimann, D. (Eds.). (2019). Open Access in der Rechtswissenschaft, Sonderheft der RW – Zeitschrift für rechtswissenschaftliche Forschung 2019 . https://doi.org/10.5771/9783748903659 Sandberger, G. (2017). Die Zukunft wissenschaftlichen Publizierens. Open Access und Wissenschaftsschranke. Anmerkungen zu den Kontroversen über die Weiterentwicklung des Urheberrechts. OdW – Ordnung der Wissenschaft , 2 , 75–96. https://ordnungderwissenschaft.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/11_2017_02_sandberger_die-zukunft-des-wissenschaftlichen-publizierens_odw.pdf Symposium: Open Access Publishing and the Future of Legal Scholarship (2006). Lewis & Clark Law Review , 10(4), 733–924. https://law.lclark.edu/law_reviews/lewis_and_clark_law_review/past_issues/volume_10/number_4.php van Dijck, G. (2016). Legal research when relying on open access: A primer. Law and Method . https://doi.org/10.5553/REM/.00001 Content editor of this page: Prof. Dr Dr Hanjo Hamann, EBS Universität for Business and Law (Last updated: October 2024)....

What is Open Access? Find an introduction here. Source: based on Brinken, H. (2021). 10 Gründe für Open Access. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4643859 ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Open Access: Pros and Cons Find an introduction here. Open Access Publishing and Self-Archiving Find an introduction here. Open Access in Medicine and Life Sciences In medicine and the life sciences, open access is particularly supported by mandates from research funders such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) , the Wellcome Trust , and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation . Calls for free access to the results of research in medicine and the life sciences point to the direct link between open access and public health, especially in the Global South. Consequently, the World Health Organization (WHO) is also committed to promoting open access to the results of medical research; it operates IRIS , a repository for the sharing of health-related information. Some research funders also provide publishing platforms on which the results of the research that they fund can be published. Examples of such platforms include Wellcome Open Research and Gates Open Research . To comply with funding requirements, the published results of NIH-funded research must be made accessible on PubMed Central (PMC) , the disciplinary repository for biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the NIH National Library of Medicine. Many of the open access journals in the life sciences that were founded in the 2010s are now well established. Journals such as PeerJ , BMJ Open , Cell Reports , and eLife focus exclusively on this domain. In addition, since around 2016, preprint servers have increasingly played a role in making the results of research in medicine and the life sciences available in open access at an early stage. They include, for example, bioRxiv and medRxiv , which have a life science focus (further preprint servers can be found in the preprint server directory provided by ASAPbio). During the COVID-19 pandemic, preprints in medicine gained increased importance for the rapid dissemination of research results. However, criticism of the publication of preprints was also voiced, because results were available before undergoing quality control through peer review and the media picked up these unreviewed results and treated them as scientific facts The infiltration of the state of the art in medicine and the life sciences by predatory publishing – especially journal hijacking (Hegedűs et al., 2024), indexjacking (Abalkina, 2024), and paper mills (Abalkina, 2023) – is proving increasingly problematic. According to estimates, around 3% of the articles published in medicine and the life sciences originate from paper mills (Van Noorden, 2023). Due to these phenomena, it is becoming more and more difficult to filter out scientifically valid results for review articles and evidence syntheses. As a result, medical treatments may become ineffective, or even dangerous (Chambers, 2024). Thus, in view of the existence of predatory publishing and hijacked journals, particular prudence is necessary. If you are unsure about the reliability of a journal, it is advisable to consult checklists such as Think . Check . Submit or to check whether the journal may have been hijacked. When it comes to paper mills, editors and publishers in particular must be vigilant to avoid being overrun by mass submissions of inferior quality. At the publisher level, there are now several initiatives such as United2Act and STM Integrity Hub that are dedicated to combatting the problem and filtering out such submissions by technical means even before the peer-review stage. Open Access Journals As of April 2024, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listed 4,462 indexed journals under the subject category "Medicine" alone, of which over 581 had been awarded the DOAJ Seal . The journal list on the PubMed Central platform also offers search possibilities. Versions of articles from certain journals are available free of charge immediately upon publication or after an embargo period or are available in open access under a Creative Commons licence. The Electronic Journals Library (EZB) provides information on the open access status of journals in medicine and the life sciences. What are Open Access Journals? Find an introduction here. Practical Tip Publishing Open Access: How to evaluate a journal's quality What are Open Access Books? Find an introduction here. open-access.network (2026) ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Open Access Books As of April 2024, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) listed over 11,399 titles under the search string "Life Science" OR Medicine , and the OAPEN Library listed 332 titles under the search term " medical ". As scholarly communication in medicine and the life sciences takes place for the most part via journal publications, open access books are not at the forefront of discussion in this domain. Larger publishers with a medical or life science focus and a portfolio of open access journals usually also offer open access book programmes in which books can be published in open access against payment of a book processing charge (BPC) . While most programmes are still strongly geared towards printed books, a small number of initiatives promote purely electronic implementation, particularly with a view to exploiting the advantages of a digital environment and enhancing publications with multi-media content such as videos or audio files (Bardi & Manghi, 2014; Breure et al., 2011) or with links to further materials. They include, for example, the Living Handbooks programme offered by ZB MED – Information Centre for Life Sciences , which focuses particularly on handbooks. Disciplinary Repositories The leading repositories in medicine and the life sciences include: PubMed Central , full-text archive at the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine Europe PMC , a full-text platform funded by an alliance of 27 funders of biomedical research PUBLISSO Disciplinary Repository for Life Sciences provided by ZB MED – Information Centre for Life Sciences PubMed Central is by far the most important repository in medicine and the life sciences. It is a database of choice for literature searches, and thus plays a key role in ensuring the visibility of journals, institutions, and authors in the life science disciplines. As an offering from Germany, the PUBLISSO Disciplinary Repository for Life Sciences provided by ZB MED – Information Centre for Life Sciences offers researchers the possibility of publishing or self-archiving documents, articles, and research data. In addition, it offers institutions in the fields of medicine, healthcare, and food, environmental, and agricultural sciences that do not have their own repositories the possibility of cohesively presenting their publications on their own institute pages. An overview of relevant repositories is provided by the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) . What are Repositories? Find an introduction here. Legal Aspects Find legal information on open access here. Practical Tip Finding Open Access Literature (in German) Open Access Helpdesk You are welcome to contact our Helpdesk of you have any questions about open access. oa.finder The oa.finder shows you from tens of thousands of journals which are Gold Open Access, whether they charge APCs and how high these are. You can also view the funding modalities of your own institution. open-access.network ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Open Science in Medicine and Life Sciences Because of the immense importance of medical and life science information for society, there are numerous initiatives to promote the opening of the research cycle in this domain, and especially to facilitate access to and the reuse of research data . Information on research data in medicine and the life sciences can also be found under Lebenswissenschaften "on the German-language information portal on research data management Forschungsdaten.info . Many journals in medicine and the life sciences require that, when submitting a manuscript, authors provide a data availability statement indicating where the research data underlying the results can be found – also, and especially, so that these data can be included in the peer review. In addition, to improve the transparency and reproducibility of research, journals are increasingly insisting that these data – as well as code, protocols, and other materials – are adequately described. The journals of the Nature Portfolio are one example of this. In its code of conduct, “ Guidelines for Safeguarding Good Research Practice ”, the German Research Foundation (DFG) also advocates that researchers should wherever possible document and make available their research data in accordance with the FAIR Principles (Wilkinson et al., 2016). Within the framework of the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) , numerous consortia are being funded that aim to ensure access to and the sharing of data – also, and especially, personal and sensitive data – by developing appropriate infrastructure and standards. At the same time, the accessibility and sharing of studies are also to be improved. One example is the Study Hub of the NFDI4 Health Consortium. In the life sciences, increasing use is being made of electronic lab notebooks, the digital variant of traditional hard-copy lab notebooks. The advantage here is that the data are collected directly in digital form and can thus be integrated more easily into the research data management system, thereby enabling them to be made available at a later date through improved documentation. In addition, the digital environment offers further advantages, such as time stamps, linking, connection to other applications and analysis tools, search and filter functions, functionalities for collaborative work, and reuse of templates, etc. Furthermore, electronic lab notebooks provide some protection against data loss, for example through illegible handwriting or loss. ZB MED – Leibniz Information Centre for Life Sciences has compiled information to assist in the selection of electronic lab notebooks , as well as a guide with best practice examples. Open Access in Biology Find an introduction here. References Abalkina, A. (2023). Publication and collaboration anomalies in academic papers originating from a paper mill: Evidence from a Russia-based paper mill. Learned Publishing , 36 (4), 689–702. https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1574 Abalkina, A. (2024). Challenges posed by hijacked journals in Scopus. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology , 75 (4), 395–422. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24855 Bardi, A., & Manghi, P. (2014). Enhanced publications: Data models and information systems. LIBER Quarterly, 23 (4), 240–273. https://doi.org/10.18352/lq.8445 Breure, L., Voorbij, H., & Hoogerwerf, M. (2011). Rich Internet publications: "Show what you tell." Journal of Digital Information , 12 (1). https://journals.tdl.org/jodi/index.php/jodi/article/view/1606 Chambers, H. (2024). Unmasking the fraud: How paper mills are undermining scientific publishing. Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology , 66 (10), 1262–1263. https://doi.org/10.1111/dmcn.15997 Hegedűs, M., Dadkhah, M., & Dávid, L. D. (2024). Masquerade of authority: Hijacked journals are gaining more credibility than original ones. Diagnosis , 11 (3), 235–239. https://doi.org/10.1515/dx-2024-0082 Van Noorden, R. (2023). How big is science’s fake-paper problem? Nature , 623 (7987), 466–467. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03464-x Wilkinson, M. D., Dumontier, M., Aalbersberg, I. J., Appleton, G., Axton, M., Baak, A., Blomberg, N., Boiten, J.-W., Santos, L. B. da S., Bourne, P. E., Bouwman, J., Brookes, A. J., Clark, T., Crosas, M., Dillo, I., Dumon, O., Edmunds, S., Evelo, C. T., Finkers, R., … Mons, B. (2016). The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship. Scientific Data , 3 (1), 160018. https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18 Content editor of this page: Dr Jasmin Schmitz, ZB MED – Leibniz Information Centre for Life Sciences (Last updated: April 2025)....

What is Open Access? Find an introduction here. Source: based on Brinken, H. (2021). 10 Gründe für Open Access. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4643859 ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Open Access: Pros and Cons Find an introduction here. Open Access in Linguistics The topic of Open Access has been receiving increasing amounts of attention in linguistics since around 2012. Two particularly significant events that played a role in this were the founding of Language Science Press by German linguists Stefan Müller and Martin Haspelmath in 2014 and the emergence of the journal Glossa , catalysed by a conflict between the editorial board of the journal Lingua and its publisher, Elsevier , in 2016. The eLanguage platform of the Linguistic Society of America, founded in 2006 by Stephen R. Anderson and Dieter Stein, is an important precursor to these two initiatives. Unfortunately, this platform is no longer active, although several journals that used to be part of eLanguage – such as Semantics & Pragmatics , Dialogue & Discourse and Journal of Historical Syntax – continue to enjoy a flourishing existence. All three of these journals are scholar-led initiatives . Established publishers are reacting to these developments, slowly but inexorably. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft – the journal of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) – has been open access since 2017. From 2025, it will be available in diamond open access from PubliKon at the University of Konstanz. Open Access Journals As of November 2024, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listed 906 indexed journals under “ linguistics ”, most of which are diamond open access – that is, they do not charge fees to either authors or readers. A further list of open access linguistics journals can be found in the oaling blog . Important open access linguistics journals include: Constructions Glossa DOAJ Glossa Psycholinguistics Semantics & Pragmatics DOAJ Linguistik Online DOAJ Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft DOAJ Biolinguistics DOAJ Open Linguistics DOAJ Dialogue & Discourse DOAJ Journal of Historical Syntax DOAJ Syntactic Theory and Research In addition, there are many journals dedicated to the linguistic investigation of particular languages or language families, such as Studies in African Linguistics , Finno-Ugric Languages and Linguistics , Indo-European Linguistics , and Isogloss . What are Open Access Journals? Find an introduction here. Practical Tip Publishing Open Access: How to evaluate a journal's quality Video on the Funding of Open Access Articles Source: Becklas Dorow, C., Hauss, J. (2026). Funding Open Access Articles – What Are the Options?. Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB), open-access.network. https://doi.org/10.5446/73596 ( CC BY 3.0 DE ) What are Open Access Books? Find an introduction here. open-access.network (2026) ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Open Access Books As of November 2024, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) listed 4,282 titles under “ linguistics ”, and the online library OAPEN listed 16,187 titles under “ linguistics ”. The key player in the landscape of open access books in linguistics is Language Science Press , a publisher whose costs are borne primarily by a consortium of university libraries. This enables them to avoid charging book processing charges (BPCs) entirely. However, in addition, virtually all presses that regularly publish linguistics books now offer the opportunity to publish open access upon payment of a BPC. It is increasingly common for monographs and edited volumes to be published in open access. As regards handbooks, MIT Press publishes a series of Open Handbooks in Linguistics . Open access textbooks , too, are becoming increasingly common . Disciplinary Repositories The most important repositories in linguistics include LingBuzz (for general linguistics) and semanticsarchive.net (for the core areas semantics and pragmatics). Depending on authors’ disciplinary identities, linguistics papers can sometimes also be found at Humanities Commons (CORE) or arXiv.org . The Open Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) also provides an overview of relevant repositories. What are Repositories? Find an introduction here. Video über das Zeitveröffentlichungsrecht Quelle: Brehm, E. (2021). Zweitveröffentlichungsrecht für Wissenschaftler*innen, open-access.network. https://doi.org/10.5446/51789 ( CC BY 3.0 DE ) Practical Tip Finding Open Access Literature (in German) Open Access Helpdesk You are welcome to contact our Helpdesk of you have any questions about Open Access. oa.finder The oa.finder shows you from tens of thousands of journals which are Gold Open Access, whether they charge APCs and how high these are. You can also view the funding modalities of your own institution. Other Offerings The oaling blog provides a list of open access journals as well as a roundup of developments in the area of open access in linguistics. LingOA (Linguistics in Open Access) functions as an umbrella organisation for open access journals; its aim is to transform established subscription-based journals to open access. Open access book reviews are regularly published on Linguist List . Open Science in Linguistics Linguistics researchers work with different types of data, from experimental findings to text corpora. Here, the principles of openness and transparency have become increasingly important in recent years. Berez-Kroeker et al. (2022) published an Open Handbook of Linguistic Data Management . Linguistic research data and software can be deposited in the Tromsø Repository of Language and Linguistics (TROLLing). Access to text and language corpora plays a significant role in linguistics – especially in corpus and computational linguistics. The dominant way in which corpora are provided is to set up a web-based query option (either freely accessible, usable free of charge after registration, or not freely accessible). This makes optimal use of the structure and annotation of the corpora and requires neither download nor software installation. However, as a rule, the corpora and tools themselves cannot be downloaded and reused for further dissemination or analysis. This is often due to copyright reasons. Examples include the COSMAS corpora of the IDS (Institute for the German Language) in Mannheim, Varitext (French, University of Cologne), and the DWDS (Digital Dictionary of the German Language) , where a core corpus ( Kerncorpus ) can be freely downloaded. By contrast, LAUDATIO (Humboldt Universität Berlin), which focuses on corpora of historical language stages, practises an open access model. The European initiative LRE Map covers a large number of linguistic resources (data, tools, guidelines). In linguistics, the open source idea plays an increasingly important role insofar as some tools are offered under open licences, and the standardisation and interoperability of data are taken into account. Open Text Collections , an initiative funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), aims to make text collections for descriptive linguistics available in a sustainable and open way. open-access.network ( CC BY 4.0 International ) References Berez-Kroeker, A. L., McDonnell, B., Koller, E., & Collister, L. B. (2022). The Open Handbook of Linguistic Data Management . The MIT Press. Further Reading Haspelmath, M. (2013). Why open-access publication should be nonprofit – a view from the field of theoretical language science. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience , 7 (57). https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2013.00057 Kleineberg, M., & Kaden, B. (2017). Open Humanities? ExpertInnenmeinungen über Open Access in den Geisteswissenschaften. LIBREAS. Library Ideas , 32 . https://libreas.eu/ausgabe32/kleineberg/ Müller, S. (2012). A personal note on open access in linguistics. Journal of Language Modelling , 0 (1), 9–39. https://doi.org/10.15398/jlm.v0i1.52 Content editors of this page: Prof. Dr. George Walkden , Universität Konstanz, and Prof. Dr. Christof Schöch, Universität Trier (Last updated: November 2024)....

What is Open Access? Find an introduction here. Source: based on Brinken, H. (2021). 10 Gründe für Open Access. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4643859 ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Open Access in Mathematics In contrast to their peers in many natural science or technical disciplines, mathematicians still draw on older literature when investigating current research questions. Open access in mathematics is therefore not restricted to current research results but also includes older literature. Retrodigitisation and open access to this digital content thus play an important role in this discipline. Another difference between mathematics and most natural science disciplines is the acceptance of literature that has not undergone scientific quality control. For example, in 2006, Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman was awarded the Fields Medal for a series of three papers proving the Poincaré conjecture, which he had published only on the preprint server arXiv . Because these papers were published open access, Perelman’s proof could be checked by various groups, even without undergoing classical peer review . Mathematicians are highly critical of rising journal prices. Thus, it is not surprising that in this field in particular, researchers often call for, and also participate in, boycotts of scholarly publishers (e.g. The Cost of Knowledge ). Open Access Journals As of November 2025, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listed 815 entries under Mathematics . Article processing charges (APCs) are often viewed critically. For this reason, open access mathematics journals often use business models without APCs. Many of these journals are published directly by scientific institutions or professional associations. Examples include: Journal de l'École Polytechnique – Mathématiques Documenta Mathematica Because, as mentioned above, older literature is of great importance in mathematics, older journal volumes are often made freely available online even if the current volumes are closed access and thus subject to a fee. In these cases, the moving- wall model is often used: for a certain period of time (e.g. the first five years after publication) access is fee-based; after expiry of this embargo period , access is free. When publishing works in open access journals, care should be taken – also in mathematics – to avoid predatory publishing . What are Open Access Journals? Find an introduction here. Practical Tip Publishing Open Access: How to evaluate a journal's quality Video on the Funding of Open Access Articles Source: Becklas Dorow, C., Hauss, J. (2026). Funding Open Access Articles – What Are the Options?. Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB), open-access.network. https://doi.org/10.5446/73596 ( CC BY 3.0 DE ) open-access.network (2026) ( CC BY 4.0 International ) What are Open Access Books? Find an introduction here. open-access.network (2026) ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Open Access Books As of November 2025, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) listed 95 titles under “ Mathematics “ and 207 titles under “ Mathematics & science “ , while OAPEN listed around 70 titles under “ Mathematics “ . Most books in mathematics are published with publishers that have traditional business models, and open access books are still a peripheral phenomenon. Disciplinary Repositories The most important repository in mathematics is arXiv , a preprint server for physics, mathematics, and related disciplines (see our Physics page). As arXiv grew in importance, the once-longstanding practice whereby authors published their preprints on their institutions’ websites was abandoned. Many repositories in mathematics no longer publish any new preprints (one exception: the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics’ MPIM Preprint series ). Mathematics research data can be conveniently deposited in Zenodo or in disciplinary repositories, which can be found, for example in the Registry of Research Data Repositories, re3data . In addition, there are a number of open access repositories with retrodigitised mathematics literature, the most important of which are: Göttinger Digitalisierungszentrum (GDZ) : contains, among other things, the Collection Mathematica , in which the Göttingen State and University Library’s entire historical mathematics collection up to and including the year 1900 is made accessible. NUMDAM : is located at the Université Grenoble Alpes and contains many French and Italian journals. Although access is free, embargo periods vary from journal to journal. The University of Michigan Historical Mathematics Collection: contains monographs published in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Historical Math Monographs (Cornell University Library) Project Euclid (Cornell University): hosts e-journals, many of which are open access. The Open Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) provides an overview of these and other repositories. What are Repositories? Find an introduction here. Legal Aspects Find an introduction here, Video über das Zeitveröffentlichungsrecht Quelle: Brehm, E. (2021). Zweitveröffentlichungsrecht für Wissenschaftler*innen, open-access.network. https://doi.org/10.5446/51789 ( CC BY 3.0 DE ) Practical Tip Finding Open Access Literature (in German) Open Access Helpdesk You are welcome to contact our Helpdesk of you have any questions about Open Access. oa.finder The oa.finder shows you from tens of thousands of journals which are Gold Open Access, whether they charge APCs and how high these are. You can also view the funding modalities of your own institution. Other Useful Offerings The information platform zbMATH OPEN (formerly known as Zentralblatt MATH) has been open access since 2021. Open and reusable interfaces ensure the networking and sharing of scientific information. The goal is to establish the platform as a crucial hub in an open global mathematics library. The European Digital Mathematics Library ( EuDML ) is another open access research tool. Furthermore, within the framework of the Committee on Electronic Information and Communication (CEIC) of the International Mathematical Union (IMU) , efforts are being made to develop a World Digital Mathematics Library (WDML) in which the entire mathematics literature would be indexed, interlinked, and made accessible and reusable in the long term. zbMATH OPEN is a first step in this direction. To ensure the scientific quality of open access articles, the Episciences project provides a free platform on which contributions can undergo peer review. In this way, articles deposited in arXiv can undergo scientific quality control. Open Science in Mathematics Mathematical methods are also increasingly being applied successfully in interdisciplinary research and are therefore widespread. For example, mathematical models, parameters, data, and numerical algorithms are used in machine learning. Mathematical research data have thus become very complex, multifaceted, and unwieldy. The publication of these resources in open access is therefore highly beneficial for interdisciplinary research. However, especially in the area of data sciences, huge computing capacity is sometimes required (see the Mathematical Research Data Initiative, MaRDI, 2021). Traditionally, proving theorems is a central element of the publishing culture in mathematics. These proofs must be completely understandable to readers within the contribution itself. In open access publications, all content is already freely available. For a long time, there was therefore no need to provide supplementary research data. However, as digitalisation advances, automated theorem-proving procedures , visualisations, and other types of mathematical research data are increasingly emerging, and the open accessibility of these resources is becoming more and more important. Mathematical research data are very complex and diverse. The MaRDI Knowledge Graph , which is currently being developed, links many open access sources of mathematical research data. Besides the Knowledge Graph, other research data services tailored to the mathematics community can be found on the MaRDI Portal . Software developed in mathematics is often versioned and made available via Github , which has been part of Microsoft since 2018. Public GitHub repositories can be accessed without prior registration. However, to upload one’s own data, registration is necessary; the basic functions of the service are available free of charge. Many universities and research institutes offer Git instances of their own, based, for example, on the open source platform GitLab. Some journals that cover the computationally intensive areas of mathematics, for example numerics, already check the reproducibility of the code and software components of papers. One example is Computational Science and Engineering , a gold open access journal with its own Code Review Board. Efforts are being made to extend this to other areas of mathematics. open-access.network ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Further Reading Boege, T., Fritze, R., Görgen, C., Hanselman, J., Iglezakis, D., Kastner, L., Koprucki, T., Krause, T., Lehrenfeld, C., Polla, S., Reidelbach, M., Riedel, C., Saak, J., Schembera, B., Tabelow, K., & Weber, M. (2022). Research-data management planning in the German mathematical community [Preprint]. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.12071 Das, P. K. (2017). Anatomy of open access mathematics journals. Journal of Information and Knowledge, 53(6), 447–454. https://doi.org/10.17821/srels/2016/v53i6/98585 Hanselman, J. (2025). Guidelines for writing and reviewing mathematical software. Notices of the AMS. https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202507/noti3210/noti3210.html Taubert, N. (2021). Green open access in astronomy and mathematics: The complementarity of routines among authors and readers. Minerva, 59, 173–194. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-020-09424-3 Teschke, O. (2018, December). Green, gold, platinum, nickel: On the status of open access in mathematics. EMS Newsletter. https://ems.press/content/serial-article-files/10613?nt=1 Content editor of this page: Dr Gernot Deinzer, Regensburg University Library . Last revision of content: Tabea Bacher, Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences (MPI MiS) , with the kind support of Britta Schneemann, MPI MiS (as of November 2025)....

What is Open Access? Find an introduction here. Source: based on Brinken, H. (2021). 10 Gründe für Open Access. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4643859 ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Open Access: Pros and Cons Find an introduction here. Open Access Publishing and Self-Archiving Find an introduction here. Open Access in Media Studies The field of media studies deals with the theory, history, and aesthetics of media and media systems. In Germany, media studies as a domain of cultural studies developed in the 1970s especially in the fertile soil of German literary studies , but it also borrowed concepts and methods from theatre studies, art history , and philosophy . While film studies is sometimes an integral part of stu­dy programmes in media studies, it is also offered as a degree programme in its own right. Media studies differs from the social-science and empirically oriented domains of journalism and communication studies, although overlaps may occur in some institutes and study programmes. In media studies, as in most disciplines in the humanities and cultural sciences, it is only in recent years that the switch to open access has begun on a broad front. One reason for this lies in the publishing culture in media sciences, where monographs and edited collections still play an important role. The reputation of the publisher is an important criterion for publishing activities in media science. By contrast, bibliometric indicators, such as the Journal Impact Factor , play only a comparatively minor role. In recent years, publishers have signifi­cantly increased their commitment to open access, with the result that nume­rous gold and green open access options are available to authors. The German Society for Media Studies’ (Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft, GfM) journal, Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft (ZfM) , has been published open access with the publishing house transcript since 2017. By flipping its jour­nal to open access, the GfM sent an important signal. A further milestone was the es­tablishment in 2018 of the open access repository for media studies media/rep/ , which is located at the University of Marburg. In the same year, the GfM established the scholarly interest group (SIG) Open Media Studies and a blog of the same name. Open Access Journals As of March 2024, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listed 326 indexed journals under the subject Media . Important open access journals in the field of media studies in the German-speaking and European areas include: Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe DOAJ ffk Journal Journal for Religion, Film and Media DOAJ Kieler Beiträge zur Filmmusikforschung MEDIENwissenschaft | Rezensionen Reviews mediaesthetics – Journal of Poetics of Audiovisual Images Nach dem Film Navigationen – Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturwissenschaften NECSUS – European Journal of Media Studies DOAJ Paidia – Zeitschrift für Computerspielforschung Research in Film and History DOAJ Spheres – Journal for Digital Cultures Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft DOAJ The film studies journal montage AV was one of the first journals to make its issues openly available online after an embargo period . Its extensive digital archive can be downloaded free of charge. After an embargo period of 12 months, the issues of the journal Digital Culture & Society are also freely available. What are Open Access Journals? Find an introduction here. Practical Tip Publishing Open Access: How to evaluate a journal's quality Video on the Funding of Open Access Articles Source: Becklas Dorow, C., Hauss, J. (2026). Funding Open Access Articles – What Are the Options?. Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB), open-access.network. https://doi.org/10.5446/73596 ( CC BY 3.0 DE ) open-access.network (2026) ( CC BY 4.0 International ) What are Open Access Books? Find an introduction here. open-access.network (2026) ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Open Access Books As of March 2024, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) listed 932 titles under Media studies ; in the OAPEN Library, 891 titles were listed in the category of media studies . In addition, there are categories that are of relevance especially for film studies, such as Film theory & criticism, Film, TV & radio, and Films, cinema , in which a total of 612 titles were listed in DOAB and 464 titles were listed in these categories in the OAPEN Library as of March 2024. The most important German publishers that publish media studies titles in open access include De Gruyter , Springer , transcript and Schüren . The publisher meson press , which grew out of a project at the University of Lüneburg, publishes only open access books . The following series make a number of their titles available in open access: Cinepoetics – Poetologien audiovisueller Bilder Medien'Welten – Braunschweiger Schriften zur Medienkultur Medien – Wissen – Bildung Zürcher Filmstudien In 2021, within the framework of a project on the open access transition , which was funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) , the publishing house transcript established the Open Library Medienwissenschaft in collaboration with the specialised information service for media, film and communication studies adlr.link . Disciplinary Repositories The most important repository for German-language media studies is media/rep/ , which was established in 2018. The repository collects media stu­dies publications and makes them available in open access. Its holdings include journal articles, contributions to edited collections, monographs, and series, as well as complete journal archives , for example montage AV , AugenBlick , Naviga­tionen , die Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft , Digital Culture & Society , VIEW , and NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies . Besides publications in text form, media/rep/ archives videos; from the end of 2021 on, it will also archive audio files. Furthermore, many publications in the field of media studies are also self-archived in the Social Science Open Access Repository (SSOAR) . What are Repositories? Find an introduction here. Legal Aspects Find legal information on Open Access here. Video über das Zeitveröffentlichungsrecht Quelle: Brehm, E. (2021). Zweitveröffentlichungsrecht für Wissenschaftler*innen, open-access.network. https://doi.org/10.5446/51789 ( CC BY 3.0 DE ) Practical Tip Finding Open Access Literature (in German) Open Access Helpdesk You are welcome to contact our Helpdesk of you have any questions about Open Access. oa.finder The oa.finder shows you from tens of thousands of journals which are Gold Open Access, whether they charge APCs and how high these are. You can also view the funding modalities of your own institution. Other Offerings The specialised information service for media, film and communication studies adlr.link at Leipzig University Library operates the central search portal of the discipline; open access resources are specially labelled. The Open-Media-Studies-Blog offers a public forum for topical debates on open science, open access, openness, and access in media studies and beyond. Open Access in Media Studies is a curated website that aims to inform about and promote open access publishing in media studies. MediArXiv is a community-led digital archive for media, film, and communi­cation research. It offers media studies scholars a platform to upload their working papers, preprints , post-prints , and published manuscripts. The blog filmwissenschaft.umsonst collects and comments on German-language open access publications from the areas of media, film, and television studies. Film Studies For Free is a blog that comments on and links to open access resources from the field of film and media studies. The online archives JSTOR and Project MUSE now also provide open access content of relevance to media studies. Open Science in Media Studies The German Society for Media Studies’ (GfM) scholarly interest group (SIG) Open Media Studies , which was established in 2018, aims to raise media studies scholars’ awareness of all aspects of open science and to make work processes more transparent. From 2022 onwards, the open access repository for media studies media/rep/ , in collaboration with NFDI4Culture , will accept also media studies research data. open-access.network ( CC BY 4.0 International ) References Further Reading Kammerer, D. (2020, December 14). Nicht nur suchen und finden, sondern entdecken und erforschen. Dietmar Kammerer über das Open-Access-Repositorium media/rep/ als Werkzeug medienwissenschaftlicher Forschung. Open-Media-Studies-Blog Der Zeitschrift Für Medienwissenschaft . https://zfmedienwissenschaft.de/online/open-media-studies-blog/nicht%20nur%20suchen%20und%20finden Content editors of this page: Dr Dietmar Kammerer, Philipps-Universität Marburg / NFDI4Culture , and Andreas Kirchner , University of Konstanz/open-access.network. Last revision of content: Dr Kai Matuszkiewicz, Philipps-Universität Marburg (as of Juli 2024)....

What is Open Access? Find an introduction here. Source: based on Brinken, H. (2021). 10 Gründe für Open Access. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4643859 ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Open Access: Pros and Cons Find an introduction here. Open Access Publishing and Self-Archiving Find an introduction here. Open Access in Middle Eastern, North African and Islamic Studies Middle Eastern, North African and Islamic Studies – also known as sciences relating to the MENA region (the Middle East and North Africa), and formerly known as Oriental studies – comprise a range of disciplines with a philological, cultural studies, religious studies, and area studies orientation (e.g., Arabic studies, Islamic studies, Iranian studies, Turkology). These disciplines, together with other "small disciplines", belong to the subject group "Non-European Language, Literature and Cultural Studies". At individual universities there are also departments that focus on the politics, economies or societies of the MENA region. While inter- and transdisciplinary work is a key feature of many disciplinary cultures, the orientation of the respective disciplines varies depending on their location and facilities. This variety is reflected in a heterogeneous publishing landscape. As is the norm for humanities and social science disciplines, works are published predominantly in journals and books with either a thematic, regional or chronological orientation. In addition, there are more generalist periodicals of national and international scholarly societies (e.g., the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft ZDMG , which has a retro-digitised issue archive and has been published as a hybrid open access journal through Verlag Harrassowitz since 2016). Key scholarly societies include the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (DMG), the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft, the European Association for Modern Arabic Literature (EURAMAL), the Association for Iranian Studies (AIS), the Societas Iranologica Europaea (SIE), the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Vorderer Orient (DAVO), the Deutsche Orient-Stiftung, the Deutsche Vereinigung für Religionswissenschaft e.V. (DVWR) and die Royal Asiatic Society. In the sciences relating to the MENA region, the publishing culture is still shaped by print publishing and publishing with a publisher. In the case of electronic publications, the file format PDF is often preferred in order to model the appearance of the print publication (also in terms of page numbering and layout). Furthermore, as in other humanities and social sciences disciplines, scientific reputation is established via publication venues and editorships. Scholars often publish with renowned publishers with a rich tradition, even if their offerings do not include an open access option – or if they do, it is not affordable Open Access Journals To date, there are only a few established fully open access journals in Middle Eastern, North African and Islamic Studies. They include, for example Acta Orientalia , the Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies , and Aethiopica . These journals are often edited by scholars at research institutes. However, it should be noted that in the Middle East and in Asia there is a wide range of mostly university-based open access journals that are also listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) . In addition, open access journals that use the open source software Open Journal Systems (OJS) have a much greater linguistic diversity than, for example, the articles listed in the subscription database Scopus (see Khanna et al. 2022, Fig. 6). Nowadays, the hegemony of the English language is also called into question from a bibliodiversity perspective. For sciences relating to the MENA region, this challenge is an important aspect of the decolonisation of knowledge and science (see Berger 2021). The decolonisation of open access also plays a role in this regard, as open science and some of the business models applied lead to new global hierarchies and inequalities (see Piron 2018). Scholars from the German-speaking area still publish mainly in journals in which only isolated contributions or volumes are available in open access. Apart from the relevant scholarly journals, many articles relating to the MENA region are published in journals with a different thematic focus (e.g., the Middle Ages, philosophy, medicine, law, sociology, or politics.). What are Open Access Journals? Find an introduction here. Practical Tip Publishing Open Access: How to evaluate a journal's quality Video on the Funding of Open Access Articles Source: Becklas Dorow, C., Hauss, J. (2026). Funding Open Access Articles – What Are the Options?. Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB), open-access.network. https://doi.org/10.5446/73596 ( CC BY 3.0 DE ) open-access.network (2026) ( CC BY 4.0 International ) What are Open Access Books? Find an introduction here. open-access.network (2026) ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Open Access Books In the case of monographs and edited volumes, the share of open access publications is higher than in the case of journal articles. As of April 2024, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) listed 556 publications under “Middle East”, of which the largest shares were published by Taylor & Francis (47 in total) and MDPI – Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (22 in total). Open access books are published primarily with established publishers. However, the publishers have successfully established models for the open access publication of series and individual volumes. One reason why open access is more widespread in the case of monographs and conference proceedings may be that researchers are increasingly required to make the results of publicly funded research and conferences available in open access. The team behind the blog Access to Mideast and Islamic Resources (AMIR) provides information on freely accessible material about the MENA region, including information about newly published open access books. Manuscripts and Cultural Data As a major part of research is text based, methods of the digital humanities are of particular importance for sciences related to the MENA region. Digitised copies of text-based sources can be supplemented with technical or contextual metadata and published under an open licence. The opening of research is taking place inter alia through the digitisation of manuscripts and periodicals, for example Jara'id: A Chronology of Arabic Periodicals (1800-1929) . Thus, materials that are stored at great physical distances from each other can be brought together in different ways and published under an open licence, thereby enabling them to be reused. Important networks include the Islamicate Digital Humanities Network (IDHN) and the Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI) . Disciplinary Repositories With MENAdoc , the Specialised Information Service (FID) Middle East-, North Africa- and Islamic Studies offers the entire disciplinary range of an open access repository. MENAdoc offers green open access to edited volumes, monographs and individual articles. In some instances, entire series are made freely accessible in cooperation with institutions and publishers (e.g., with the Orient-Institut Istanbul and the Orient-Institut Beirut). In some cases, monographic series are published in diamond open access in MENAdoc, for example the MECAM Papers series and the series Diskussionspapiere — Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft und Geographie im Vorderen Orient (Discussion Papers – Economics, Society and Geography in the Middle East). Depending on the focus of the publications, research results are made available to the public in various disciplinary repositories, for example media studies, sociology, etc. What are Repositories? Find an introduction here. Legal Aspects Find an introduction here. Video über das Zeitveröffentlichungsrecht Quelle: Brehm, E. (2021). Zweitveröffentlichungsrecht für Wissenschaftler*innen, open-access.network. https://doi.org/10.5446/51789 ( CC BY 3.0 DE ) Practical Tip Finding Open Access Literature (in German) Open Access Helpdesk You are welcome to contact our Helpdesk of you have any questions about Open Access. oa.finder The oa.finder shows you from tens of thousands of journals which are Gold Open Access, whether they charge APCs and how high these are. You can also view the funding modalities of your own institution. Other Useful Offerings Arabic Collections Online (ACO) is a publicly available digital library of public-domain Arabic-language content. Arabic and Middle Eastern Electronic Library (AMEEL) is a web-based portal and a digital collection of information for the study of the Middle East, including its history, culture, development, and present situation. The Digital Assets Repository (DAR) is a system developed at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the Library of Alexandria, to create and maintain the Library's digital collections, which include digitised books in the public domain. The Hindawi Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation based in England, which publishes freely accessible Arabic-language books and translations without an open access licence. The Qatar Digital Library is a growing archive that covers the modern history and culture of the Gulf and wider region. Its holdings include archives, maps, manuscripts, sound recordings, photographs, and much more, complete with context-related explanations and links, both in English and in Arabic. The objects may be used and reused free of charge. Efforts are being made to digitally archive Master's theses and dissertations and to make them available to the public, inter alia via the Egyptian Universities Libraries Consortium . Qalamos offers direct access to metadata and digitised copies of Oriental manuscript collections in Germany. Its mission is "to provide the metadata and digitised copies of Oriental holdings of all German memory institutions". A further offering is the online database of the Museum für Islamische Kunst (Museum for Islamic Art) in Berlin, which provides information on objects and works. It is part of the online portal "Islamic·Art", which provides further open access materials. Middle Eastern and North African Newspapers is an open access collection sponsored by the Center for Research Libraries. Literatur Berger, M. (2021). Bibliodiversity at the Centre: Decolonizing Open Access. Development and Change 52(2), 383–404. https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12634 . Khanna, S., Ball, J., Alperin, J. P., & Willinsky, J. (2022). Recalibrating the scope of scholarly publishing: A modest step in a vast decolonization process. Quantitative Science Studies 3(4), 912–30. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00228 . Piron, F. (2018). Postcolonial Open Access. In U. Herb & J. Schöpfel (Eds.), Open divide: critical studies on open access . Library Juice Press. https://corpus.ulaval.ca/entities/publication/2f42da75-af39-46b1-8ce1-f48ff76c059e Weiterführende Literatur Augustin, L. M. (2016, 01st September). Open Access publishing in and about the Middle East and North Africa: prospects and challenges. TRANSREGIONAL ACADEMIES . https://academies.hypotheses.org/1954 . Cross, C., Romanov, M., & Miller, M. T. (2023, 11th July). About Islamicate Digital Humanities . http://islamicate-dh.github.io/about/ . Hanafi, S., & Rigas, A. (2015). Knowledge Production in the Arab World: The Impossible Promise . Taylor & Francis Ltd. Content editors of this page: Josef Peter Jeschke, Specialised Information Service Middle East, North Africa and Islamic Studies (FID Nahost) , and Maike Neufend, Open Research Office Berlin (OROB) (Last updated: September 2023)....

What is Open Access? Find an introduction here. Source: based on Brinken, H. (2021). 10 Gründe für Open Access. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4643859 ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Open Access in Musicology In musicology, as in many other disciplines in the humanities, the primacy of print publications or closed access digital publications is only slowly declining in favour of open access . One contributory factor is the structure of the discipline: musicology is located not only at universities but also, and in particular, at colleges of music and independent research institutes, not all of which have their own infrastructure such as institutional repositories . A stronger orientation towards open access in musicology is being driven among others by the official society of German-language music theory, the Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie (GMTH) , and the German Musicological Society (GfM) (e.g., by the GMTH journal ZGMTH and GfM publications ) as well as by individual musicological scholars. Open Access Journals As of April 2024, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listed 89 entries under Music and books on music , of which only a few were in German or located in Germany. Only in recent years has the number of genuinely open access journals in musicology begun to grow. These journals are not usually published via a publishing house, but rather are often made available via the respective editors’ own platforms (e.g., in the case of the journals ZGMTH and ACT ). Since 2018, the Specialised Information Service for Musicology (Fachinforma­tionsdienst Musikwissenschaft) also offers a hosting service for open access journals under the label musiconn.publish . Important German-language open access journals in musicology include: Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie DOAJ troja – Jahrbuch für Renaissancemusik ACT. Zeitschrift für Musik und Performance Musik & Ästhetik Some journals – in consultation with the rights holders – make their content freely available online upon expiry of an embargo period ("moving wall"). In Germany, these journals include Bach-Jahrbuch Schütz-Jahrbuch Forum Musikbibliothek What are Open Access Journals? Find an introduction here. Practical Tip Publishing Open Access: How to evaluate a journal's quality Video on the Funding of Open Access Articles Source: Becklas Dorow, C., Hauss, J. (2026). Funding Open Access Articles – What Are the Options?. Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB), open-access.network. https://doi.org/10.5446/73596 ( CC BY 3.0 DE ) What are Open Access Books? Find an introduction here. open-access.network (2026) ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Open Access Books As of April 2024, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) listed 1,495 titles under the search term music , most of which were from the English-speaking area. OAPEN listed 156 titles under music . Again, most of these were in English. In the German-speaking area, open access books in the field of musicology are mainly to be found as hybrid offerings provided by the relevant publishers, for example, Schott , transcript , or Allitera . Besides these publishing house offe­rings, musicological books are made available in open access via repositories such as musiconn.publish . Disciplinary Repositories Since 2018, musiconn.publish has acted as a disciplinary repository of musico­logical literature for Germany. The repository serves to make musicological literature freely available to the public online, to index it, and to archive it on a long-term basis. This service is part of the Specialised Information Service for Musicology (Fachinformationsdienst Musikwissenschaft), which is funded by the German Research Foundation ( DFG ) and jointly maintained and operated by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Bavarian State Library, BSB) in Munich and the Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek (Library of the State of Saxony and the Technische Universität Dresden, SLUB) in Dresden . It is available to all interested authors in the field of musicology and holds open access articles and books. A number of publishers (e.g., Georg Olms Verlag) avail of the possibility to pro­vide green open access to the works they publish by self-archiving them in the repository What are Repositories? Find an introduction here. Legal Aspects Find an introduction here. Content editor of this page: Dr Andrea Hammes, SLUB Dresden (Last updated: December 2021)....

What is Open Access? Find an introduction here. Source: based on Brinken, H. (2021). 10 Gründe für Open Access. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4643859 ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Open Access in Philosophy In the German-speaking area, the development of open access in philosophy is characterised by remarkable diversity – both substantively and institutionally. Different philosophical schools of thought each have their own publication cultures, forms of communication, and reputation economies. One constitutive element of the engagement with open access in philosophy is philosophical reflection itself. Here, both epistemological and ethical dimensions play a role: Questions regarding the accessibility and availability of knowledge, scientific justice, and responsibility towards the public are negotiated. And last but not least, the societal and epistemological implications of digitalisation processes are discussed. Developments such as data tracking or the use of artificial intelligence in research raise fundamental questions that are reflected on a substantive level in the discipline. Further discussion points are the evaluation systems and metrics in scholarly publishing. In philosophy, there are critics of the Journal Impact Factor – its relevance for the culture of the discipline has been fundamentally called into question. Despite these debates, there is little systematic, empirical evidence to date regarding the concrete implementation and spread of open access in German-speaking philosophy. An initial overview of the situation can be provided by analysing the positions of relevant stakeholders. The professional societies in German-speaking philosophy, for example the German Society for Philosophy (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Philosophie, DGPhil ), the German Society for Analytic Philosophy (Gesellschaft für analytische Philosophie, GAP) , the German Society for Phenomenological Research (Deutsche Gesellschaft für phänomenologische Forschung, DGPF ), and the German Society of Aesthetics (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ästhetik, DGÄ ), have not yet taken a definitive stance on the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science (UNESCO, 2021), the position papers of the European Union, or reform papers on research evaluation (see Policy Positions ). The GAP linked Nicola Mößner and Klaus Erlach’s position paper on scientific publishing and the evaluation of scientific expertise ( Mößner & Erlach, 2024 ), describing it as “a starting point for further discussion” ( Announcement 28.02.2024 ). Regarding the colour spectrum of open access models – especially the trend towards diamond open access – it remains to be seen what positions German-speaking philosophy will take in the long term. Open Access Journals in Philosophy As of May 2026, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listed 413 entries in the philosophical subcategories of the category Philosophy, Psychology, Religion . In scholarly communication in philosophy in the German-speaking area to date, journals play an important but less dominant role than in the anglophone world. Furthermore, the importance of journals depends strongly on the respective philosophical discipline. In Germany, many long-established journals still use the subscription model. Examples include the Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie , Philosophisches Jahrbuch , ​the ​ Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung , and ​ the ​ Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie . Many of these journals have close ties to large scholarly publishers, which has so far hampered a complete transformation to open access. Cooperations between philosophical societies and publishers also contribute to this structure. The journal Information Philosophie , which ceased publication in 2022, is now accessible free of charge on the PhilPortal . Nevertheless, in recent years there has been a growing number of newly established philosophy journals that are open access from the start. Examples include the journals Philosophy & Digitality and Philosophy of AI as well as the interdisciplinary journal HannahArendt.net . The Specialised Information Service for Philosophy ( FID Philosophie ) supports such initiatives with its own hosting service for existing open access journals or open access journals that are in the process of being established . Besides the technical infrastructure, it provides advice and support with long-term visibility and indexing in relevant directories. Further support services, for example editorial training or help in developing open access strategies, are currently being developed. The German Society for Philosophy (DGPhil) provides a good overview of existing open access journals in philosophy. The linked overviews are based on automated data queries to the Electronic Journals Library (EZB) and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Note, however, that newly established journals are included in the DOAJ at the earliest after one year and that not all open access journals have been indexed to date in the DOAJ or the EZB. What are Open Access Journals? Find an introduction here. Practical Tip Publishing Open Access: How to evaluate a journal's quality Video on the Funding of Open Access Articles Source: Becklas Dorow, C., Hauss, J. (2026). Funding Open Access Articles – What Are the Options?. Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB), open-access.network. https://doi.org/10.5446/73596 ( CC BY 3.0 DE ) open-access.network (2026) ( CC BY 4.0 International ) What are Open Access Books? Find an introduction here. open-access.network (2026) ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Open Access Publishing and Self-Archiving Find an introduction here. Open Access Books Monographs remain a core medium of scholarly communication in philosophy – especially in the German-speaking area. Results of the PALOMERA project underscore the special importance of the book market for open access transformation in the humanities. Even though there is still room for improvement in terms of the implementation status, there are a number of committed initiatives that aim to initiate a sustainable open access transformation in philosophy (see Mößner & Erlach, 2024 ). Most publishers in philosophy have not yet embarked on the transformation. The publisher Transcript offers a number of open access titles that have been transformed to open access either by the authors themselves or by consortia. In cooperation with the Specialised Information Service for Philosophy (FID Philosophie), the publishers Karl Alber, Transcript, and Logos have transformed a number of titles to open access. Open access books can also be found in the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and the Open Research Library . Disciplinary Repositories At present, there is no disciplinary repository in German-speaking philosophy. The most frequently used repositories are PhilArchive and the repositories of the respective libraries. BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) can be used to search the repositories; PhilArchive is also integrated in the PhilPortal search. Zenodo and GitHub are also used, especially on the threshold of the digital humanities. What are Repositories? Find an introduction here. Legal Aspects Find legal information on Open Access here. Video über das Zeitveröffentlichungsrecht Quelle: Brinken, H. (2020). Finanzierung von Open-Access-Artikeln, open-access.network. https://doi.org/10.5446/49536 ( CC BY 3.0 DE ) open-access.network ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Open Science in Philosophy The question of how to handle research data has now arrived in philosophy, where it is the subject of lively debate . Within the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) cosmos, the consortia Text+ , NFDI4memory , and NFDI4culture are particularly relevant. For example, Text+ is currently building a Registry for (digital) editions , which is already integrated in PhilFinder . Text+ also provides lexical resources and text collections. Another important point of contact is the DGPhil working group Philosophie der Digitalität , in which diverse projects on the topic are discussed. For example, PhiWiki , a semantic wiki software application for philosophy scholars, has its origins in this working group. Other Offerings With B!son (Bibliometrisches und Semantisches Open Access Recommender Netzwerk) , TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and University Library and the Saxon State and University Library Dresden (SLUB) provide a tool that helps authors to find suitable open access journals for their manuscripts by entering textual data (e.g. manuscript title and abstract). Retrodigitised works also a play major role in philosophy. However, a unified directory of such works is still lacking. Open access digital editions can be found in the Registry of the NFDI consortium Text+. The editions are also linked under the corresponding authors in the Specialised Information Service for Philosophy’s search tool PhilFinder . Practical Tip Finding Open Access Literature (in German) Open Access Helpdesk You are welcome to contact our Helpdesk of you have any questions about Open Access. oa.finder The oa.finder shows you from tens of thousands of journals which are Gold Open Access, whether they charge APCs and how high these are. You can also view the funding modalities of your own institution. References Mößner, N., & Erlach, K. (2024). Elektronisches Publizieren und Bewertung wissenschaftlicher Expertise. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10948472 UNESCO. (2021). UNESCO recommendation on open science. https://doi.org/10.54677/MNMH8546 ​​​​​Content editors of this page: Dr Malte Dreyer, University of Göttingen , and Eric Eggert, University of Cologne/Specialised Information Service for Philosophy (Last updated: May 2026)....

What is Open Access? Find an introduction here. Source: based on Brinken, H. (2021). 10 Gründe für Open Access. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4643859 ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Open Access: Pros and Cons Find an introduction here. Open Access Publishing and Self-Archiving Find an introduction here. Open Access in Physics Open access has been an integral part of the publication and information structure in physics for a long time now. The publication of preprints plays a major role in this discipline. The main reason for this publication culture is that researchers have a great interest in making scientific articles available directly and without delays due to publication processes. Thus, the repository arXiv was created as early as 1991. The process of making all scholarly journals or articles in high energy physics open access has already been implemented within the framework of the project SCOAP³ (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics) (see Open Access Journals ). CERN points the way for open access in physics worldwide. It has assumed a leading role in all major open access initiatives, for example in the funding of SCOAP³ , the operation of the interdisciplinary repository Zenodo in collaboration with the European Commission, and the development of the repository software Invenio . In Germany, the Max Planck Society , DESY, the centre for research on particle acceleration at the Helmholtz Association , and TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and University Library are particularly engaged in the area of the long-term funding of open access business models in physics. These institutions also act as SCOAP³ National Contact Points and participate in the funding of the disciplinary repository arXiv . Via the national project SCOAP³-DH , TIB organises the participation of German higher education institutions (HEIs) in SCOAP³, and in the network arXiv-DH , it organises the funding of the German HEIs’ contribution to arXiv. Open Access Journals As of April 2024, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listed 647 entries under the keyword physics . As early as 1999, the Institute of Physics, together with the Deutsche Physika­lische Gesellschaft, started the New Journal of Physics , one of the first gold open access journals. SciPost is an independent, not-for-profit platform for scholarly diamond open access publications, especially in the natural sciences such as physics and chemistry. It is operated by the Amsterdam-based SciPost Foundation . Scholarly articles published by SciPost are fully open access – with no costs for authors or readers. Funding is provided through a consortial support model whereby universities, libraries, and research organisations, among others, make voluntary contributions. The peer-review procedure is open and transparent. All reviews, authors’ replies, and discussions are publicly available. The scientific community actively takes on the roles of reviewers, commentators, and editors. SciPost is a not-for-profit entity. It does not levy article processing charges (APCs) , but rather is financed by institutional grants (“sponsorships”), for example from universities, libraries and library consortia, research organisations, funding agencies, foundations, and governmental bodies. The aim is to create a sustainable, just, and accessible scholarly publishing system – free from commercial interests. Conclusion: SciPost stands for transparency, scientific self-responsibility, and fairness. It is considered a pioneering model in the area of open science. Overall, the publication output of open access journals in physics is low compared with that of subscription journals in this field. This is due to the fact that green open access – for the most part the self-archiving of preprints before publication in a journal – predominates. Against this background, the international project SCOAP³ was initiated in the field of high energy physics with the aim of publishing peer-reviewed journal articles under a Creative Commons licence . SCOAP³ is a global consortium of libraries, library consortia, research funding organisations, and research per­forming organisations. It collaboratively implements the process of converting scholarly journals in the field of high energy physics to open access. All articles (in gold or hybrid open access journals) are funded by the consortium. The average APCs are significantly lower than those of comparable transformation processes , and no costs arise for the authors. The goal of the project is to replace article processing charges with fair market prices. An overview of participating journals with the respective percentages of articles funded by SCOAP³ and the absolute number of articles funded to date (updated daily) can be found on the SCOAP³ Journals web page. What are Open Access Journals? Find an introduction here. Practical Tip Publishing Open Access: How to evaluate a journal's quality Video on the Funding of Open Access Articles Source: Becklas Dorow, C., Hauss, J. (2026). Funding Open Access Articles – What Are the Options?. Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB), open-access.network. https://doi.org/10.5446/73596 ( CC BY 3.0 DE ) What are Open Access Books? Find an introduction here. open-access.network (2026) ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Open Access Books As of April 2024, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) listed around 739 titles under the subject physics ; 86 titles were listed by the OAPEN Library . In physics, most books are published with traditional publishers; open access books are still a peripheral phenomenon. Disciplinary Repositories As mentioned above, preprints have a very long tradition in physics. As from the 1960s, a culture of making preprints available developed and became estab­lished, especially in the field of high energy physics. Against this background, Paul Ginsparg founded the electronic repository arXiv at Los Alamos National Laboratory on 14 August 1991. This represents a key milestone in the history of open access . To this day, arXiv, which has been operated by Cornell Tech since 2020, is a model for disciplinary repositories. To ensure the long-term and sustainable operation of the repository, arXiv is funded for the most part by Cornell University , the Simons Foundation , and institutional members . Besides preprints, preliminary results and discussion papers are published on arXiv that are not published elsewhere for the time being. Before submitting their first preprints to arXiv, authors are usually required to obtain an endorsement – that is, established authors in the relevant field must endorse their submissions. Authors affiliated with a known academic institution or research facility can be exempted from this requirement. ArXiv stands out as a disciplinary repository with simple functionalities and – compared with peer review – reduced quality assurance mechanisms. In physics, many publishers enable manuscripts deposited in arXiv to be directly submitted to their journals. For example, the publication portal SciPost directly accepts arXiv records as submissions; manuscripts do not have to be uploaded. An overview of relvant repositories is provided by the Open Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) . What are Repositories? Find an introduction here. Legal Aspects Find an introduction here. Video über das Zeitveröffentlichungsrecht Quelle: Brehm, E. (2021). Zweitveröffentlichungsrecht für Wissenschaftler*innen, open-access.network. https://doi.org/10.5446/51789 ( CC BY 3.0 DE ) Practical Tip Finding Open Access Literature (in German) Open Access Helpdesk You are welcome to contact our Helpdesk of you have any questions about Open Access. oa.finder The oa.finder shows you from tens of thousands of journals which are Gold Open Access, whether they charge APCs and how high these are. You can also view the funding modalities of your own institution. Other Offerings INSPIRE-HEP is an open access digital database for publications and preprints in the field of high energy physics. It is a collaborative project of CERN, DESY, Fermilab, and other partners. Besides standard information on the publications, for example bibliographic details and links to full texts, the metadata records also include references and citations. INSPIRE-HEP thus enables the generation of author profile pages with citation analyses. Moreover, INSPIRE-HEP provides information on HEP institutions, experiments, and conferences. Important sources of information, for example arXiv.org or the NASA Astrophysical Data System are also integrated. Open Science in Physics In physics, there are many different open science initiatives, first and foremost CERN’s Open Data Portal , where two terabytes of data on experiments at CERN are freely available and reusable . Moreover, there are numerous repositories with physics data, all of which are listed in the Registry of Research Data Repositories, re3data.org . In addition, program code is often published open source on special project pages of the participating working groups. Infrastructural institutions are rarely involved. Examples of open source programs in theoretical solid state physics are ABINIT and QUANTUM ESPRESSO . open-access.network ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Further Reading Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft (2021). DPG-Positionspapier zur Zukunft des wissenschaftlichen Publikationswesens . http://bit.ly/31UElmw Ginsparg, P. (2021). Lessons from arXiv’s 30 years of information sharing. Nat Rev Phys 3 , 602–603. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-021-00360-z Tautz, D., Holzer, A., Schmidt, K. M., Buchner, J., Grötschel, M., & Jurburg, S. (2025). Ein neues Verfahren zur direkten Finanzierung und Evaluation wissenschaftlicher Zeitschriften. Diskussion Nr. 38 . Halle (Saale): Nationale Akademie der Wissenschaften Leopoldina. Content editor of this page: Dr. Gernot Deinzer , Regensburg University Library, and Prof. Dr. Dieter Weiß, Regensburg University (Last updated: July 2025)....

What is Open Access? Find an introduction here. Source: based on Brinken, H. (2021). 10 Gründe für Open Access. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4643859 ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Open Access: Pros and Cons Find an introduction here. Open Access Publishing and Self-Archiving Find an introduction here. Open Access in Political Science Political science is characterised by overlaps with other disciplines, for example sociology , history , law and administrative science , and philosophy . Depending on the sub-discipline, it is influenced by developments in the culture of neighbouring disciplines and adopts their methods. Whereas the humanities-oriented fields of political science, such as political theory, continue to have a strong affinity for book publishing, and open access has therefore not yet become very firmly established there, a more dynamic development towards open access can be observed in the sub-disciplines with a social science and international focus, where journal articles are the dominant form of distribution of research results. The American Political Science Association (APSA) , which is the most important political science association in the world, has been operating APSA Preprints , an open access publication platform for political science preprints, since 2019. In 2024, the largest political science association in Germany, the German Political Science Association (GPSA) , published a statement on open access and open science (in German), in which it underscored the importance of diamond open access in cooperation with independent publishers or non-profit-oriented research infrastructures as an important prerequisite for the success of the open access transformation. Of the major German-language political science journals, the Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft and the Politische Vierteljahresschrift , for example, are available for the most part in open access (to date only as hybrid journals ) as part of the DEAL agreement with Springer Nature. Other key German-language political science journals, such as the Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen and the Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen , have also been published only as hybrid open access to date – that is, they offer authors the option of "buying the freedom" of individual articles (i.e., making them open access) by paying an article processing charge (APC) . A special role is played by the think tanks in the area of application-oriented political science. Think tanks are public or private institutions that analyse foreign policy processes. They focus mainly on concrete options for action for policy makers, while also aiming to influence the political public at large. Many current publications from the leading think tanks, such as Clingendael in the Netherlands, the German Institute for International and Security Affairs and the Center for Applied Policy Research in Germany, and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in Sweden, are for the most part freely accessible, albeit not completely open access. They are well publicised and can be downloaded easily from the respective websites. On the other hand, the problem with this type of grey literature is its findability at the usual search venues and the long-term digital availability of its content. Open Access Journals As of April 2024, the Directory of Open Access Journals listed 644 indexed journals under the keyword “ political science” . Purely open access journals (i.e., all articles are available in open access) of relevance to political science are: Africa Spectrum doaj Central European Journal of International & Security Studies doaj Health and Human Rights doaj (Gebühren werden nur in Rechnung gestellt, wenn diese durch die Einrichtung der Autorin oder des Autors übernommen werden können) Journal of Deliberative Democracy doaj Journal of Political Ecology doaj Leviathan. Berliner Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft Neue Politische Literatur. Berichte aus Geschichts- und Politikwissenschaft Open Gender Journal doaj Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft doaj Perspectives on Terrorism doaj Political Philosophy Redescritptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory Revue Internationale de Politique de Développement doaj Totalitarianism and Democrary. An International Journal for the Study of Dictatorship and Liberty (Totalitarismus und Demokratie. Zeitschrift für internationale Diktatur- und Freiheitsforschung) Zeitschrift diskurs ZRex – Zeitschrift für Rechtsextremismusforschung doaj Global Studies Quarterly doaj Policy and Society doaj Political Research Exchange doaj Research & Politics doaj In most cases, new journals from the major international academic publishers appear in open access. Because they have been in existence for only a short time, these young journals have been able to build up only low or average bibliometric indices, compared with the established core journals in this field. Among the 10 political science journals with the highest Journal Impact Factors in 2022, according to the Journal Citation Report (JCR), there are no purely open access journals. Of relevance in this context is the development of alternative metrics ( altmetrics ), which are also critically discussed in political science (Meibauer et al., 2024). New open access journals often occupy regional niches or are in new sub-disciplines and therefore have a more limited scope per se. The situation of German-language political science journals should be viewed independently of this. The fact that the internal market for German-language journals is small, increases the economic risk of open access transformations or start-ups for the publishers operating there – unless there is institutional funding (as, for example, in the case of Africa Spectrum or of Totalitarismus und Demokratie , where the transformation to open access is supported by the Specialized Information Service for Political Science – Pollux). Some of these journals (e.g., Perspectives on Terrorism ) have been able to establish themselves beside renowned journals from international scholarly publishers. In addition, in the area of journals, optional article-level open access in hybrid journals is increasingly being availed of across disciplines through the publish & read licences (e.g., DEAL). This relates also to internationally important publishers for political science, such as Sage und Taylor & Francis. In the Web of Science, the share of gold open access among the political science articles published between 2020 and 2023 was almost one third, and the trend is rising. The increasing share of open access among journal articles is also apparent in a study by Breuning and Aykol (2024), who also showed that having research funding at one's disposal is decisive for the question of whether or not works can be published in open What are Open Access Journals? Find an introduction here. Practical Tip Publishing Open Access: How to evaluate a journal's quality Video on the Funding of Open Access Articles Source: Becklas Dorow, C., Hauss, J. (2026). Funding Open Access Articles – What Are the Options?. Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB), open-access.network. https://doi.org/10.5446/73596 ( CC BY 3.0 DE ) open-access.network (2026) ( CC BY 4.0 International ) What are Open Access Books? Find an introduction here. open-access.network (2026) ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Open Access Books As of August 2024, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) listed 3,033 titles under the search term " political science ", and the OAPEN Library listed around 8,602 titles under the search term "political science" . In the case of political science monographs and edited volumes, open access is becoming increasingly widespread. At Taylor & Francis/Routledge, for example, the share of open access books in the section “Politics & International Relations” recently stood at just over 8%. At Springer Nature/Palgrave, a sample of titles in the collection "Political Science and International Studies" for the most recent publication years yielded an open access share of 9.4%. At Nomos Publishing, one of the leading academic publishers for political science in the German-speaking area, the share of open access works among new political science titles between 2020 and May 2024 was 12.6%. By now, all major publishers (including German publishers) offer an open access option, with the result that, at the publishers of relevance to political science, more and more books are available in open access. The publication costs are financed (possibly pro rata) from project funding and through institutional sources such as publication funds or crowdfunding, as is the case with the transcript Open Library Politikwissenschaft , which is supported by the Specialized Information Service Political Science – Pollux (Hanneken et al., 2020). Disciplinary Repositories Important repositories include: SSOAR - Social Science Open Access Repository : The largest full-text server for the social sciences, SSOAR is operated by GESIS Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften . SSRN – Social Science Research Network : a preprint server with research publications from the social and life sciences, the humanities, and economics and business studies. The PSN (Political Science Network) in SSRN holds over 240,000 papers by around 190,000 authors. SocArXiv : This social science document server holds working papers, preprints, and self-archived published papers. APSA Preprints : the political science preprint server of the American Political Science Association (APSA) . An overview of relevant repositories is provided by the Open Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) . What are Repositories? Find an introduction here. Legal Aspects Find an introduction here. Video über das Zeitveröffentlichungsrecht Quelle: Brehm, E. (2021). Zweitveröffentlichungsrecht für Wissenschaftler*innen, open-access.network. https://doi.org/10.5446/51789 ( CC BY 3.0 DE ) Practical Tip Finding Open Access Literature (in German) Open Access Helpdesk You are welcome to contact our Helpdesk of you have any questions about Open Access. oa.finder The oa.finder shows you from tens of thousands of journals which are Gold Open Access, whether they charge APCs and how high these are. You can also view the funding modalities of your own institution. Other Offerings The online archives JSTOR and Project MUSE now also provide open access content relevant to political science. Open Science in Political Science The visibility of and access to political science research data will gain in importance in future, for example, for the secondary analysis of research results or for meta-analyses. Two social science research data repositories, one of which covers quantitative methods and the other qualitative methods, shall be mentioned here: Archiving BASIS : a social science and economics research data repository for quantitative primary and secondary data Qualidata Network : a search portal for qualitative social science research data open-access.network ( CC BY 4.0 International ) References Breuning, M., Akyol, S. (2024). Who publishes open access? PS: Political Science & Politics . https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096524000106 Hanneken, S., Jobmann, A. & Schönfelder, N. (2020). Die transcript OPEN Library Politikwissenschaften – Ein Modell für Open-Access-eBooks in den Geistes- & Sozialwissenschaften. Informationspraxis , 6 (2). https://doi.org/10.11588/ip.2020.1.66637 Meibauer, G., Phull, K., Alejandro, A., & Ciflikli, G. (2024). Alternative metrics, traditional problems? Assessing gender dynamics in the altmetrics of political science. European Political Science , 23 (2), 179–198. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41304-023-00431-y Further Reading Czolkoß-Hettwer, M. (2025). Zwischen Hoffnung und Ernüchterung: Open Access in der Politikwissenschaft. DVPW Blog (Deutsche Vereinigung für Politikwissenschaft). https://www.dvpw.de/blog/zwischen-hoffnung-und-ernuechterung-open-access-in-der-politikwissenschaft-ein-beitrag-von-michael-czolkoss-hettwer Czolkoß-Hettwer, M., Lein, P. & Mayr, P. (2024). Probleme und Potenziale der Forschungsinfrastrukturförderung in Deutschland am Beispiel des Fachinformationsdienstes Politikwissenschaft. Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft , 34 (1), 101–122. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41358-024-00371-z König, T. (2020). Converting to Open Access. The Austrian Journal of Political Science (OZP) as a case study. Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft , 49 (3), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.15203/ozp.3184.vol49iss3 Papillon, M., O’Neill, B., Bourque, M., Marland, A. & White, G. (2019). Open access and academic journals in Canada: A political science perspective. Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue Canadienne de Science Politique , 52 (4), 903–922. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423919000799 Taubert, N., Sterzik, L. & Bruns, A. (2024). Mapping the German Diamond Open Access journal landscape. Minerva , 62 (2), 193–227. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-023-09519-7 Vauteck, B. (2008). Open Access als alternative Publikationsform für die deutsche Politikwissenschaft. Argumente und Strategien (Berliner Handreichungen zur Bibliotheks- und Informationswissenschaft; 232 ). https://doi.org/10.18452/18209 Content editors of this page: Michael Czolkoß-Hettwer und Regina Pfeifenberger, Specialized Information Service Political Science (FID Pollux) (Last updated: October 2025)....