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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 an introduction here. Open Access Publishing and Self-Archiving Find an introduction here. 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 in African Studies The field of African studies encompasses interdisciplinarily oriented area studies on Africa in the humanities, the social sciences, and cultural studies. Depending on the discipline, ( ethnology , political science , linguistics ) developments in the area of open access correspond to those in the respective disciplinary cultures: whereas open access often plays only a minor role in many humanities disciplines, developments in linguistics are certainly more dynamic. For a long time, printed monographs and edited volumes were the primary form of publication in African studies. However, in recent years, the importance of (online) journals has increased greatly. For Africanists, the prestige of a journal is still often the decisive selection criterion. This holds true both for disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals. The Journal Impact Factor is also gaining importance, although it is demonstrably unsuitable for the evaluation of Africa-related publications (see African Studies Library, 2022 ). [1] The spread of forms of open access publishing is of particular importance for African studies, as print publications by African publishers are often difficult to access because of inadequate distribution opportunities. Moreover, publications from the Global North are often difficult to access on the African continent because of the publishers’ high prices and distribution channels. Besides the use of green open access , the expansion of diamond open access offerings is of particular importance in this context, especially because of the obstacles that open access publication fees represent for authors from the Global South. Despite these circumstances, open access is still somewhat underrepresented in African studies compared with other disciplines, although there are now several important initiatives for the promotion of open access in African studies, for example the African Principles for Open Access in Scholarly Communication in and about Africa . The repository AfricArXiv is an important initiative (see the Disciplinary Repositories section on this page). Best-practice examples of open access were presented in 2017 at a workshop organised by the Specialised Information Service (FID) African Studies (VAD e. V., 2017) and in 2022 in collaboration with open-access.network . Furthermore, in the African Studies Toolbox , the FID African Studies regularly presents relevant information on open access , for example a series on the Zweitveröffentlichungsrecht ( secondary publication right ) under German Copyright Law, as well as information on open access initiatives of publishers with series on Africa-related research. The latter initiatives are described in more detail in the Open Access Books section on this page. Open Access Journals As African studies is an interdisciplinary field, there is no specific keyword for searching in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). With 141 titles as of March 2024, journals from South Africa are particularly well represented, while 27 indexed journals could be found under the keyword African Studies . Important open access journals in the field of African studies include: Africa Spectrum DOAJ Afriques : Débats, Méthodes et Terrains d'Histoire DOAJ Nordic Journal of African Studies DOAJ Journal of African Languages and Literatures DOAJ The African Journal of Information and Communication DOAJ The open access journals of the Dakar-based Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) – for example Africa Development , African Sociological Review , African Journal of International Affairs , and Afrika Zamani – are among the pioneers of open access in African studies. They are available together with all back issues on the CODESRIA website. The journal Africa Spectrum has been published by the GIGA Institute for African Affairs (IAA) since 1966. Through financial support from the Federal Foreign Office , the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), and the city of Hamburg , it is available in open access at Sage Publishing. Since 2003, the journal has collaborated closely with the Association for Africa Studies in Germany (VAD) . Members of VAD support this collaboration as editors, as members of the editorial board, as authors, and in the peer-review procedure . Furthermore, a subscription to the print edition is included in VAD membership ( dual publishing ). African Journals Online (AJOL) is a South African online service that provides access to research published in Africa. As of March 2024, it listed 485 open access journals. Sabinet , which is also based in South Africa, provides access to the full texts of journals from and about Africa; as of March 2024, it listed 130 open access journals. Global Africa is a pan-African, international journal dedicated to the dissemination of and the quest for excellence in humanities and social science research on the African continent and in the African diaspora. In accordance with the diamond open access model, authors or their institutions do not have to pay article processing charges (APCs) , and the full-text versions of Global Africa articles are freely available to readers online as soon as they are published on the Global Africa website . What are Open Access Journals? Find an introduction here. Practical Tip Publishing Open Access: How to evaluate a journal's quality 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 42 titles under the keyword Africa and 218 titles under African History . In addition, there are open access books in African linguistics, for example those published by Language Science Press . As of March 2024, OAPEN listed 25 titles under Africa and 116 titles under African History . On the Open Book Publishers website, search results under the keyword Africa include titles from various disciplines. In addition, there is a series of open access books in the African Studies Collection of the publisher Routledge that were unlocked in collaboration with Knowledge Unlatched . The Africa-Europe Group for Interdisciplinary Studies (AEGIS) publishes a book series with the publisher Brill . Books in the AEGIS series are available in open access, albeit after an embargo period of two years. In addition to the titles published with Brill, CODESRIA lists a large number of open access book titles on its website . African Minds is a not-for-profit open access publisher of scholarly books based in Cape Town, South Africa; it publishes predominantly in the social sciences and humanities. Disciplinary Repositories The most important repository of African studies is AfricArXiv , a freely accessible digital archive for African and Africa-related research hosted by the Open Science Framework (OSF) . It offers a platform for working papers, preprints , and accepted manuscripts ( post-prints ). There are also options for linking research data and code and for article versioning. AfricArXiv is multidisciplinary, but because of its focus on research from Africa, it is a valuable resource for African Studies. The International African Institute (IAI) in London has produced an interactive map of digital repositories in Africa in collaboration with AfricArXiv. This interactive map identifies and lists institutional repositories in Africa. It builds on earlier work by the IAI that focused on identifying repositories at African university libraries, and it also includes other institutions and their document servers, for example national and international repositories. Furthermore, it maps the interactions between the research repositories. An overview of repositories on the African content is also provided by the Open Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) in its country overview. What are Repositories? Find an introduction here. Legal Aspects Find an introduction here. Open Access Helpdesk You are welcome to contact our Helpdesk if 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 (FID) Africa Studies at the University Library Johann Christian Senckenberg in Frankfurt am Main offers the African studies community an OJS hosting service that provides support in establishing an open access journal . This service includes both the technical provision, maintenance, and regular updating of OJS on a permanently available server as well as advice on and practical support for the conceptual design and the creation of the journal(s). References African Studies Library. (2022). The Journal Impact Factor in African Studies . https://africanstudieslibrary.org/en/toolbox/the-journal-impact-factor-in-african-studies/ VAD e. V. Vereinigung für Afrikastudien in Deutschland (2017). Open Access Workshop des FID Afrikastudien . https://www.vad-ev.de/oa-workshop/ Further Reading Bezuidenhout, L., Havemann, J., Kitchen, S., De Mutiis, A., & Owango, J. (2020). African digital research repositories: Mapping the landscape [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3732172 Bezuidenhout, L., Havemann, J., Kitchen, S., De Mutiis, A., & Owango, J. (2020). African digital research repositories: Mapping the landscape [preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3732274 Content editor of this page: Dr Anne Schumann-Douosson, Specialised Information Service (FID) African Studies (Last updated: July 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 Art History Works in art history are increasingly being published in digital formats, and open access plays an important role in this regard. For example, Heidelberg University Library , together with its Specialised Information Service Art, Design, Photography, arthistoricum.net , have jointly developed strategies for digital publishing in the arts with representatives of the professional associations in the field of art history. Particularly in Die Zukunft des kunsthistorischen Publizierens [The Future of Art Historical Publishing]), an e-book edited by Maria Effinger and Hubertus Kohle (2021), the possibilities of digital publishing are set out in numerous contributions from an art history perspective. These thoughts were further developed by Maria Effinger (2023) in an article entitled “ Kunstgeschichte kommunizieren? Aufgaben, Herausforderungen und Weiterentwicklungspotenziale beim elektronischen Publizieren im Open Access ” [Tasks, Challenges, and Potential for Further Development When Publishing Electronically in Open Access]. A further fundamental work entitled Digitales Publizieren in den Geisteswissenschaften: Begriffe, Standards, Empfehlungen [Digital Publishing in the Humanities: Concepts, Standards, Recommendations] (AG Digitales Publizieren , 2021) was published by the Digital Publishing Working Group of the association Digital Humanities in the German-Speaking Area (DHd) . Veronika Fischer and Grischka Petri’s (2022) guide Bildrechte in der kunsthistorischen Praxis [Image Rights in Art Historical Practice] provides answers to questions about image rights. Open Access Journals As of September 2025, the Directory of Open Access Journals ( DOAJ ) listed 87 entries under the search term History of the arts and 686 entries under Fine arts . Besides newly established open access journals, retrodigitized journal volumes are also available in open access. New issues of these journals either appear simultaneously in print and in digital format, or the digital version is made available in open access after an embargo period (delayed open access). Important open access journals published in the German-speaking area include: 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual – Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte und visuellen Kultur DOAJ ABE-Journal: Architecture Beyond Europe DOAJ Belvedere Research Journal ; International Journal for Digital Art History Journal for Art Market Studies DOAJ kritische berichte. Zeitschrift für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaft Kunstchronik. Monatsschrift für Kunstwissenschaft Kunstgeschichte. Open Peer Reviewed Journal kunsttexte.de – Journal für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte Pegasus. Beiträge zum Nachleben antiker Kunst und Architektur RIHA Journal DOAJ Sediment – Materialien und Forschungen zur Geschichte des Kunstmarkts transfer – Zeitschrift für Provenienzforschung und Sammlungsgeschichte | Journal for Provenance Research and the History of Collection Within the framework of the Specialised Information Service Art, Design, Photography, arthistoricum.net , for which it is co-responsible, Heidelberg University Library provides a technical infrastructure for publishing open access journals . The offering is addressed to art historians worldwide. The publication platform uses the open source software Open Journal Systems (OJS), which is provided by the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) . As of September 2025, 52 open access journals were being published via arthistoricum.net. 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 September 2025, the Directory of Open Access Books ( DOAB ) listed 581 titles under the keyword History of art and 36 titles under History of art/art & design styles , while the OAPEN Library ( OAPEN ) listed 27 titles under History of art/art & design styles . Many international museums and research institutions, for example the Getty Research Institute’s Getty Publications Virtual Library , the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s MetPublications , and the Canadian Online Art Book Project , now offer cost-free access to a selection of their books. The open access publication platform arthistoricum.net ART-Books , which is provided by Heidelberg University Library , publishes open access scholarly e-books from the fields of art history, photography, and design ( gold open access ) and also makes digital versions of print books from these fields available to the public ( green open access ). The cost-free offering is addressed to art historians worldwide. The platform uses the open source software Open Monograph Press (OMP) , which is provided by the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) . Disciplinary Repositories ART-Dok , the publication platform of arthistoricum.net, offers scholars from all over the world an opportunity to make their digital art history publications (monographs, articles, lectures, etc.) available in open access. The self-archiving of digital versions of works published in print format elsewhere is also possible and desired. As of September 2025, ART-Dok contained over 9,500 open access publications. Overviews of relevant repositories are also provided by the Open Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) and by re3data under the search terms Art History and Data Access (as of September 2025). 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 Subject Portals and Platforms The information and service portal for art history arthistoricum.net is operated by the Saxon State and University Library Dresden (SLUB) and Heidelberg University Library. The Digital Art History Research Group , a platform for digital art history, promotes networking among scholars in the field of art history who develop, use, and theoretically reflect on digital tools and methods. The Deutsche Verband für Kunstgeschichte e. V . (German Association for Art History) represents the interest of art historians working in Germany and at German institutions abroad. The online archives JSTOR and Project MUSE now make available open access content of relevance to art historians. Databases and the Like The Art Discovery Group Catalogue is an international database with holdings from art and museum libraries in the USA and Europe. Via arthistoricum.net ’s catalogue, users can search for literature of relevance to art history. Searches in the full texts of collections and in image sources and disciplinary repositories are also possible. The Getty Research Portal is a subject portal of the Getty Research Institute. The portal offers worldwide open access to digitized art history literature. The Database Information System (DBIS) provides an overview of databases in the areas of art history and architecture . Image Databases The Bildarchiv Foto Marburg at Philipps-Universität Marburg is the German Documentation Centre for Art History. With around 2.6 million images, it is one of the largest digital image archives for European art and architecture. With around 7 million digitized images, the Deutsche Fotothek is a universal archive of art and cultural history. It is located at the Saxon State and University Library Dresden (SLUB) . heidICON is Heidelberg University Library’s object and multimedia database. prometheus is a distributed digital image archive for research and teaching located at the Department of Art History at the University of Cologne . With almost 4 million high-quality digitized images from the fields of art and archaeology, the web-based collection currently connects 128 databases from institutes, research facilities, and museums on a common user interface. Open Science in Art History Although open access has received strong support in the field of art history in recent times, legal, technical, and organizational issues relating to the publication and archiving of art history research data still put obstacles in the way of many scholars who want to publish their data open access. To remedy this, the consortium NFDI4Culture , which was established in October 2020, has set itself the goal of creating an infrastructure for research data on tangible and intangible cultural assets and, when doing so, to engage with the needs of the communities. The NFDI4Culture Helpdesk advises art historians on various aspects of handling research data. Questions can be asked about legal aspects, publishing and archiving data, digitization in general, open access standards, and support for the planning of funding proposals. Moreover, with its FAIR Clearing Unit, NFDI4Culture has created an advisory service that promotes the application of quality standards such as the FAIR Principles. The Munich Memorandum 2024 – Research Data in Art History: 10 Theses (Deutscher Verband für Kunstgeschichte e. V. et al., 2024) formulates from the perspective of art history in Germany current requirements, positions, and impulses for the further development of digital art history research data and their infrastructure. In addition to the possibility of archiving research data in institutional research data repositories, research data relating to open access publications on arthistoricum.net can also be published online and archived with arthistoricum.net@heiDATA . DARIAH-EU is a European network that not only supports and improves digital research and teaching in the arts and humanities but also promotes the transition to open science in these fields. open-access.network ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Praxistipp Wie und unter welchen Bedingungen audiovisuelle Materialien als Open Educational Resources in Forschung und Lehre genutzt werden dürfen, erläutert das Rechtsgutachten von Klimpel & Rack (2023) . References AG Digitales Publizieren (2021). Digitales Publizieren in den Geisteswissenschaften: Begriffe, Standards, Empfehlungen. https://doi.org/10.17175/wp_2021_001_v2 Effinger, M., & Kohle, H. (Eds.) (2021). Die Zukunft des kunsthistorischen Publizierens. arthistoricum.net. https://doi.org/10.11588/arthistoricum.663 Effinger, M. (2023). Kunstgeschichte kommunizieren? Aufgaben, Herausforderungen und Weiterentwicklungspotenziale beim elektronischen Publizieren im Open Access. kritische berichte51(1). https://doi.org/10.11588/kb.2023.1.92820 Fischer, V., & Petri, G. (2022). Bildrechte in der kunsthistorischen Praxis. Ein Leitfaden (2nd ed.). Verband Deutscher Kunsthistoriker e.V. http://doi.org/ 10.11588/artdok.00007769 Deutscher Verband für Kunstgeschichte e. V., Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg, Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte (2024). Forschungsdaten in der Kunstgeschichte: 10 Thesen - Münchner Memorandum 2024. https://doi.org/10.11588/artdok.00009194 Content editor of this page: Alexandra Büttner. Last revision of content: Maria Effinger, Heidelberg University Library (as of October 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. 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 in the Arts In recent years, the arts disciplines have also increasingly taken a position on open access . Because they are situated between the arts and the sciences, they always play a special role in this regard. The arts are characterised not only by a diversity of disciplines that work both artistically and academically, but also by an extremely diverse publishing landscape with actors from the areas of science, culture, education, and (creative) industry. The diversity of the arts disciplines is also reflected in the broad range of publications, which may be text-based or non-text-based. Whether they be artist books, exhibition catalogues, photos, music/performance productions, or 3D-objects, these publications usually require consideration of numerous legal issues and are often a challenge for publishing platforms. The currently existing infrastructures for open access publications are geared mostly towards text-based publications and are not adequate for the needs in the arts. The infrastructures in the area of research data , some of which already exist or are currently being developed, are important points of reference and are groundbreaking for open access infrastructures (not only) in the arts. In addition, because of the close links with the creative industries, develop­ments in the arts impact a new area for the open access community – namely, the economic livelihood of artists. Artists work both for cultural and educational institutions and in the culture industry; they are dependent on marketing their content; and their publications are financed only partly via royalties. Moreover, they are often members of collecting societies, and are limited in their freedom to freely license their works. An open access strategy in the arts must therefore include the safeguarding of artists’ incomes. The arts disciplines already clearly show that open access must always be seen in the context of all building blocks of open science and of all actors. Open Access Journals As of March 2024, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listed 627 entries under the keyword fine arts and 89 entries under music and books on music . The listed open access journals cater often for the arts-related scholarly disciplines but only rarely for the arts or artistic practice. In addition, journals are not the dominant form of publication in the arts disciplines. What are Open Access Journals? Find an introduction here. 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 169 titles under the keyword fine arts , while the OAPEN Library listed around 450 titles under art . However, the search results are mainly publications from the areas of art/art history or even ethnology rather than from the visual or applied arts. In the last few years, the first open library consortia have been establishing themselves, for example the Open Library Medienwissenschaft since 2021 and KOALA Media Studies since 2023. Disciplinary Repositories The most important disciplinary repositories in the arts include: ART-Dok , the full-text server of the Specialised Information Service for Art, Photography and Design musiconn , the portal of the Specialised Information Service for Musicology media/rep/ , an open access repository for media studies publications The above-mentioned repositories are geared towards text-based publications. The increasing importance of open access in the arts is also changing the discip­linary repositories: needs are being identified and new projects that deal with the building of repositories for non-text-based and multimedia media are arising. 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) Fokusgruppe "OA-Künste" Die digitale Fokusgruppe OA-Künste ist ein Netzwerk mit Mailingliste, das für alle künstlerischen Einrichtungen und Hochschulen offensteht. 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 network Open Access in den Künsten [Open Access in the Arts] offers all artistic institutions and higher education institutions a forum for exchange and discussion. The aim of the network is to share materials and information and to anchor the open access idea in the arts. The focus of the network is on libraries, which, as service facilities, promote and contribute to shaping the establishing of open access structures at various levels. Open access is also gaining in importance in art and museum libraries ( Hahn, 2018 ). Besides making text-oriented electronic resources available, these libra­ries have long been administering analogous special collections, such as image archives, graphical collections, or artist books. Here, open access can be a step towards digital transformation and the expansion of the collection profile and the information offering. Via synergy effects, this can also advance open access in the arts. For several years now, the Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Kunst- und Mu­seumsbibliotheken (Working Group of the Art and Museum Libraries, AKMB) has offered further training in the area of open access. Open Science in the Arts Open science is also a key topic in the arts. The process of creating art, and also the works themselves, often move between several components of open science. In view of the diversity of the content and formats in the arts, it is therefore very expedient to focus not only on open access but also on open science as a whole, including, for example, open research data. Besides the open access infrastructures, the offerings of cultural institutions and research data infrastructures also offer points of reference. The expertise that exists in NFDI4Culture and other representatives of the GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) is a valuable support for the arts in establishing publication infrastructures. NFDI4Culture is a consortium within the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) that represents the art history, musicology, theatre, dance, architecture, film, and media studies communities. The aim of the consortium is to establish a range of offerings such as advisory and training services, guidelines, and forums for discipline-specific exchange. Moreover, NFDI4Culture engages with the legal complexities of dealing with cultural heritage, for example with questions of provenance or copyright. open-access.network ( CC BY 4.0 International ) References Hahn, C. (2018). Open Access im Museum . Herbstfortbildung AKMB Dresden. https://www.initiativefortbildung.de/pdf/schlaglichter_AKMB2018/Hahn_OA_Museum.pdf Further reading Somajni, Chiara; Tóth-Czifra, Erzsébet; Barbieri, Chiara; Marazza, Suzanna and Pensa, Iolanda (2024). Open Science for Arts, Design andMusic: Guidelines for Researchers, Librarians and Practitioners in the Humanities . SUPSI, CC0 1.0 except where otherwise stated. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.13896781 Content editors of this page: Anika Wilde, Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch , and Friederike Kramer, Library of the Berlin University of the Arts, UdK (Last updated: July 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 Biology The publishing landscape in biology is being shaped by a large and steadily growing number of open access journals. Initiatives such as Plan S in Europe and Plan U in the United States ( Sever et al., 2019 ), as well as the nationwide licence agreements negotiated by Projekt Deal (now the DEAL Consortium) in Germany, are also bringing about structural change towards open access as the standard publishing model in biology. The next step to be taken is the transition to diamond open access models. Preprint servers such as bioRxiv are now widely used, as they enable the rapid communication of research results before peer-review processes are completed. Besides scholarly articles and the underlying research data, software developments and AI models are important outcomes of the scientific process. Open access to these outcomes is ensured through a large number of international repositories and databases. Open Access Journals As of December 2025, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listed 897 journals under “Biology” and “Microbiology”, the most important of which include: eLife PLOS Biology PLOS ONE Scientific Reports Open Biology BMC Biology One of the driving forces of the open access movement in biology is the publisher Public Library of Science (PLOS) . With the establishment of the journal PLOS Biology in 2003, it laid a foundation stone for the dissemination of the open access idea in the life sciences . Besides PLOS Biology, PLOS publishes further journals, including PLOS ONE , which is considered the archetype of a megajournal – a model that has since been adopted by many other publishers (e.g., Springer Nature with Scientific Reports ). One important characteristic of these megajournals is that submitted manuscripts are assessed solely on the basis of their scientific validity. Rejections due to lack of relevance – as is often the case with many other journals – do not happen at megajournals. Thus, based on the number of articles published per annum, PLOS ONE is one of the largest scholarly journals in the world. Another publisher that plays a pioneering role in the area of open access is BioMed Central , which is now part of Springer Nature. It has a large portfolio of journals and is a co-founder of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) . The open access publisher Frontiers also plays a formative role. It publishes numerous life sciences journals, is a member of OASPA, and has distinguished itself through its community model of peer review The open access journal Open Biology was founded by the Royal Society in 2011. And in 2012, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society, and the Wellcome Trust founded the journal eLife with the declared aim of providing a high quality alternative to Nature, Science, and Cell. Open Research Europe is a diamond open access publishing venue that was initiated by the European Commission. It enables researchers to rapidly publish articles, data, and methods stemming from EU-funded projects. The platform combines preprint publication with downstream, transparent peer review. Especially in the life sciences, it is used to make results from Horizon Europe-funded projects rapidly accessible, to implement data practices that comply with the FAIR Data Principles , and to ensure a high level of visibility. It thus offers an important alternative to traditional publishing models and promotes a culture of open science in Europe. 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 December 2025, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) listed 1,550 titles in the category “ Biology, life sciences ”, while OAPEN listed over 125 titles under “ Biology, life science ”. Although open access books have not played a prominent role in biology to date, there are numerous open access (text)books of outstanding quality. They include, for example, Microbiology , which is jointly published by OpenStax and the American Society for Microbiology Press. Disciplinary Repositories The most important repositories in biology include: bioRxiv : This preprint server specifically for the life sciences has been provided by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory since 2013. Use of the server intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic, and in many life sciences disciplines, self-archiving preprints there is now the norm. arXiv : Operated by Cornell University Library, this preprint and post-print server has for some years now had a Quantitative Biology section with 11 categories. Preprints : This multidisciplinary platform also has a biology section. PaleorXiv : This subdiscipline-specific preprint server hosts and provides access to preprints from palaeontology. PUBLISSO-Fachrepositorium Lebenswissenschaften (FRL) : Hosted by ZB MED, this repository offers authors the possibility of self-archiving their texts and research data. PubMed Central and Europe PubMed Central : These platforms are the largest venues in the world for post-print versions of publications. The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) requires that author accepted manuscripts (i.e. post-prints) of articles arising from NIH-funded projects be made publicly available on PubMed Central immediately after publication in a journal. These manuscripts do not necessarily have to be made available under an open licence, nor must they be part of the BMC Open Access Subset , which can be separately downloaded and searched . Preprints are now an integral part of publishing practice in biology. Initiatives such as Plan U ( Sever et al., 2019 ) and ASAPbio (Accelerating Science and Publication in biology) advocate that preprints of all scholarly articles should be made freely available. The Open Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) also 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 ) open-access.network ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Open Access in Medicine and Life Sciences Find an introduction here. Open Science in Biology In the biosciences, there are many projects – also in collaboration with other disciplines – that develop as grassroots movements and address various aspects of the scientific process in the spirit of open science. They aim, for example, to increase the public online availability of research data (open data), software source code (open source), lab journals (open notebook science), manuscript peer reviews (open peer review), teaching materials ( open educational resources ), the quantification of the impact of publications ( open metrics ), and research funding proposals, including their reviews (Mietchen, 2014). However, open science also means opening up science to society (citizen science, e.g. the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) project Finde den Wiesenknopf [Find the Great Burnet]). Some journals also see a need to increase the transparency of research. For example, since 2014, PLOS ONE has required that all data underpinning research must be made available together with the publication. PLOS Biology and PLOS Genetics support th e Research Resource Identification Initiative , which helps researchers to assign unique identifiers to their research materials and methods. In biology, too, numerous communities have adopted the FAIR Data Principles , in order to ensure more efficient and sustainable use of data and software. For many years now, there have been repositories and databases for some data in biology. For example, via websites and application programming interfaces (APIs), the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) , in particular, offer structured access to various data collections, such as sequences and structures of biomolecules like DNA, RNA, and proteins. As of December 2025, the Registry of Research Data Repositories, re3data , listed almost 1100 peer-reviewed data repositories in the area of biology. Despite all these initiatives and offerings, it is clear that by no means all research communities in biology are being reached, and by no means all technical potential is being adequately used to ensure the effective sharing of knowledge. This discrepancy between theoretical possibilities and actual implementation can be explained, among other things, by the fact that the ways in which researchers and the outputs of their research are evaluated when jobs and funding are being allocated remain unchanged. The evaluation criteria are generally limited to formal publications in scholarly journals and the Journal Impact Factor . This practice impacts researchers’ motivation to make their results, data, and methods publicly available at an early stage, and thus prevents the broad and rapid reuse of these resources. A rethinking of the evaluation of research outputs is thus desirable. This is precisely the change to which the signatories of the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) aspire. Specifically, they advocate that, besides making the necessary infrastructure available, incentives should be created for making the results of scholarly research available to the public as early as possible and free of technical, financial, and legal barriers. The National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) , which is currently under construction in Germany, is another important project in the area of open science in biology. Within the framework of this project, new technical and structural foundations are being created for research data management in the whole of Germany. In the first two selection rounds of the NFDI Programme, several consortia from the life sciences and biomedical research ( DataPlant , GHGA , NFDI4BioDiversity , NFDI4Health , NFDI4Immuno , NFDI4Microbiota ) received funding. By making infrastructure, know-how, and training available, and also by developing and establishing (metadata) standards, these consortia aim to promote open and efficient science as well as the implementation of the FAIR Data Principles and cultural change in that direction. Practical Tip Finding Open Access Literature (in German) Open Access Helpdesk You are welcome to contact our Helpdesk if 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 On the left-hand side you can find helpful services and tools to inform yourself about specific questions on Open Access. References Mietchen, D. (2014). The Transformative Nature of Transparency in Research Funding. PLOS Biology, 1 2(12). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002027 Sever, R., Eisen, M., & Inglis, J. (2019). Plan U: Universal access to scientific and medical research via funder preprint mandates. PLOS Biology, 17 (6). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000273 Further Reading Rapp Learn, J. (2019). What bioRxiv’s first 30,000 preprints reveal about biologists. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-00199-6 Rat für Informationsinfrastrukturen (RFII). (2016). Leistung aus Vielfalt. Empfehlungen zu Strukturen, Prozessen und Finanzierung des Forschungsdatenmanagements in Deutschland. https://rfii.de/download/rfii-empfehlungen-2016/ Galtier, N., Belkhir, K., Antoine, P.-O., Bibal, C., Boëte, C., Delsuc, F., Huchard, E., Kéfi, S., Maeder, C., Paradis, L., Puechmaille, S. J., Queffelec, A., Scornavacca, C., Smadja, C. M. (2026). Time to publish responsibly: DAFNEE, a database of academia-friendly journals in ecology and evolutionary biology, Journal of Evolutionary Biology , 39(2) . https://doi.org/10.1093/jeb/voaf143 Content editor of this page: Prof. Dr. Konrad Förstner, ZB MED – Information Centre for Life Sciences (Last updated: December 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. Perception of Open Access Survey on requirements and obstacles in selected technical and natural sciences: Mechanical engineering and chemistry. Open Access in Chemistry The acceptance and spread of open access are still less advanced in chemistry than in physics or biology , for example. The reasons for this are diverse and undoubtedly arise also from the traditional development of the chemistry community. Nevertheless, there has been an increase in open access activities in chemistry in recent years. For example, large specialist publishers have converted several journals to open access, and chemical societies have intensified their activities towards open access, as shown, for example, by the establishment of the preprint server ChemRxiv . One pioneer in this field is Peter Murray-Rust of the University of Cambridge, who has been active both in the area of open access and open data . There are still reservations about open access publishing in chemistry – also because of fears regarding the free reuse of research results by industry and the related aspects of patent-protected results. However, these fears can be dispelled by granting suitable reuse licences. Although the German Chemical Society (GDCh) was critical of Plan S in a statement issued in 2018, its partner publisher Wiley-VCH signed a transformative agreement with DEAL in 2019 ( Schmitz, 2019 ). Moreover, a DEAL agreement with Springer Nature has been in force since 2020, and in 2024, a DEAL agreement was concluded with Elsevier. Open Access Journals As of October 2024, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listed 636 indexed journals under the keyword chemistry . The most important open access journals in chemistry include: ARKIVOC Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry Journal of Cheminformatics (BMC) Chemical Science (RSC) ChemistryOpen (Wiley -VCH ) ACS Central Science Communications Chemistry Although this list is just a small selection of chemistry journals with open access models, it includes journals from relevant publishers or with a long open access tradition. In addition to their traditional, subscription-based journals or their hybrid journals, some large and eminently relevant and renowned publishers – for example the American Chemical Society (ACS), the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), and Nature Publishing – also offer open access journals in chemistry. Furthermore, the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) is planning to convert its entire journal portfolio (44 journals as of 2024) to open access by 2028 (see https://www.rsc.org/news-events/articles/2022/oct/rsc-oa-commitment/ ). Although the Journal Impact Factor as a quality metric is very controversial (see the Declaration on Research Assessment, DORA ), it should be noted that many of the aforementioned open access journals have sizeable Impact Factors. For example, according to the Journal Citation Reports (JCR), as of 2023, the Impact Factor of the RSC journal Chemical Science was 7.6, and the Impact Factor of the ACS journal ACS Central Science was 12.7. One journal that has been open access since the beginning of the open access movement is ARKIVOC (established in the year 2000). It covers organic chemistry, including areas of bio-organic and organometallic chemistry. The journal is published by ARKAT USA, Inc ., a not-for-profit organisation established through charitable donation in the year 2000, whose aim is to promote the dissemination of organic chemical research worldwide, hence benefitting students, researchers, and commercial and non-commercial enterprises. Thus, neither the submission of an article to ARKIVOC nor its publication is subject to author-side fees. This is also true of the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry (BJOC) , which has been published in open access since 2005 and is fully funded by the Beilstein-Institut. Thus, both journals fall under the label “platinum” or “ diamond open access ”. In addition to being reusable completely free of charge, the articles are published under a CC BY licence, thereby enabling their greatest possible reuse. The Journal of Cheminformatics was established in 2009 as an open access journal at BioMed Central (BMC), which is now part of Springer Nature. It covers all areas of cheminformatics and molecular modelling. The citation rate has more than doubled in the past five years, increasing from 3,490 citations in 2019 to 9,430 citations in 2023. The journal ChemistryOpen has been published since 2012 by Wiley-VCH on behalf of ChemistryEurope, an association of 16 European chemical societies. Until 2020, ChemistryEurope was known as ChemPubSoc Europe. 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 October 2024, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) listed 1,960 titles under the keyword chemistry , and the OAPEN Library listed some 972 titles under the search term chemistry in the subject area science . The most important publishers of chemistry include Taylor & Francis , Springer Nature , and De Gruyter , all of whom have published only a small number of open access books in chemistry to date. Disciplinary Repositories The most important disciplinary repositories in chemistry include: Beilstein Archives : contains preprints from the fields of organic chemistry and nanotechnology that are intended for publication in one of the Beilstein journals. The service is operated and funded by the Beilstein-Institut. ChemRxiv : a server for preprints in chemistry and related areas. ChemRxiv is collaboratively managed and funded by the five largest chemical societies in the world: the ACS, the Chinese Chemical Society, the Chemical Society of Japan, the GDCh, and the RSC. PubMed Central : contains full texts of biomedical and life sciences journal literature (incl. biochemistry, medical chemistry). It is the full-text archive of the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). The archive was developed and is maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at NLM. Institutional repositories of relevance for chemistry include, for example, JuSER , the publication portal of Forschungszentrum Jülich; the publications database of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht ; the publications repository of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf ; and Renate , the German National Library of Science and Technology’s (TIB) repository for science and technology. 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 if 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. FID Chemie Other Offerings Chemistry is shaped by laboratory work. The experiments conducted are documented in so-called lab notebooks, or lab books. These records are still often kept in paper form. However, as digitalisation advances, the possibilities of digital documentation are also increasing. Chemotion is an electronic lab notebook (ELN) for chemistry, in which molecules and reactions can be systematically recorded in digital form ( Tremouilhac et al., 2017 ). In addition, the content and data can be made freely available for reuse under a Creative Commons licence via the affiliated Chemotion repository . The development of the Chemotion open source software was funded by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). For an overview of various electronic lab notebooks, see the ELN-Wegweiser (ELN guide) published by ZB MED ( Adam & Lindstädt, 2020 ). Open Science in Chemistry Although the topic of open science and its sub-topic open access to research data are still addressed less in chemistry than in other disciplines, there are small rays of hope, for example in the area of crystallography. The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) and the Crystallography Open Database (COD) provide an access to crystallographic data that is already well established in that community. There are already a number of open access databases in the area of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy (e.g. the Spectral Database for Or ganic Compounds ) that can be used to search for and to compare spectroscopic data. However, this is mostly limited more to the depiction of spectra than to the actually recorded data points Chemical data and information can be deposited and made freely available in the PubChem database at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) . PubChem collects information on, for example, chemical structures, identifiers, chemical and physical properties, and biological activities. Within the framework of the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NDFI) , the topic of open science and the handling of research data at national level is being addressed in the chemistry consortium NFDI4Chem (Steinbeck et al., 2020). The aim is to advance the digitalisation of all relevant steps in chemical research in order to support researchers in collecting, storing, processing, analysing, disclosing, and reusing research data. Within the framework of NFDI4Chem, discipline-specific repositories for research data are also being developed further. They include, for example, the repository Chemotion for diverse analysis data; the NMR spectroscopy data repository nmrXiv ; and RADAR4Chem, a generic repository for all types of chemical research data. The Registry of Research Data Repositories (re3data) provides a good overview of further research data repositories for chemistry. open-access.network ( CC BY 4.0 International ) References Adam, B., & Lindstädt, B. (2021). Electronic laboratory notebooks in the context of research data management and good research practice – A guide for the life sciences . ZB MED – Leibniz Information Centre for Life Sciences. https://www.publisso.de/fileadmin/user_upload/PUBLISSO/PUBLISSO_ELN-Guide_2021-04-07_view_englisch.pdf Schmitz, K. (2019). DEAL-Vereinbarung tritt heute in Kraft . https://web.archive.org/web/20250803053202/https://www.gdch.de/service-information/nachricht/article/deal-vereinbarung-tritt-heute-in-kraft.html Steinbeck, C., Koepler, O., Bach, F., Herres-Pawlis, S., Jung, N., Liermann, J., Neumann, S., Razum, M., Baldauf, C., Biedermann, F., Bocklitz, T., Boehm, F., Broda, F., Czodrowski, P., Engel, T., Hicks, M., Kast, S., Kettner, C., Koch, W., … Wulle, S. (2020). NFDI4Chem – Towards a national research data infrastructure for chemistry in Germany. Research Ideas and Outcomes, 6 , Article e55852. https://doi.org/10.3897/rio.6.e55852 Tremouilhac, P., Nguyen, A., Huang, Y.-C., Kotov, S., Lütjohann, D. S., Hübsch, F., Jung, N., & Bräse, S. (2017). Chemotion ELN: An Open Source electronic lab notebook for chemists in academia. Journal of Cheminformatics , 9 (1), Article 54. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13321-017-0240-0 Further Reading Brazil, R. (2024, September 2). Will open science change chemistry? Chemistry World . https://www.chemistryworld.com/careers/will-open-science-change-chemistry/4020023.article Jensen, J. (2021, January 8). Open access chemistry publishing options in 2021. Proteins and Wave Functions . https://proteinsandwavefunctions.blogspot.com/2021/01/open-access-chemistry-publishing.html Content editor of this web page: Dr. Janna Neumann, TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology (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. 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 in Computer Science With roots in mathematics and electrical engineering, the still young academic discipline of computer science has always adopted an open approach to the research results achieved. Success stories include open source operating systems, such as Linux, and the typesetting system LaTeX, which is well established in the field of scholarly publishing, in particular. Because of the many links to other disciplines (bioinformatics, business informatics, …), framework conditions for scholarly publishing differ across the individual subfields. The main focus of the present article is on the core of computer science. Since the mid-1990s, conferences, symposiums, and even workshops, have established themselves as publication venues for the dissemination of research results, and they hold a dominant position vis-à-vis traditional scholarly journals. This is also reflected in the programme areas of scholarly publishers and of professional societies that act as publishers. The strong focus on conference publications regularly leads to perception problems in the scientific landscape, for example when this form of publication is ignored in evaluation processes ( Jagadish, 2008; Vardi, 2009; Vardi, 2010; Konstan & Davidson, 2015 ). This tension between conference publications and journal articles also manifests itself in the current open access offerings in the field of computer science. In individual subfields (e.g., theoretical computer science and cryptology), there is a well-established preprint culture. Various publication venues for workshops and conferences have become established, which differ in terms of their level of requirements or their thematic focus. Among journals, progress in the direction of open access is somewhat subdued but nonetheless tangible. The commercial publishers have recognised that open access is an additional source of revenue. However, many open access journals in computer science operate without the backing of a traditional publisher and are organised from within the community, which sometimes means that the level of professionalisation, for example when it comes to getting indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) , is very different. The national and international scientific associations in the field of computer science have to date adopted a more conservative approach to open access, although there has been some movement on the topic in recent years: The German Informatics Society (GI): Although the GI signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities in 2007, and although it makes its series Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI) freely available online, the scholarly journals of the thematic fields are still strongly tied to the classic subscription model . Via the Digital Library , subdivisions of the GI can make their own publications available in open access. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM): The US-based ACM has been participating in the Plan S initiative since January 2021. Moreover, via ACM Author-Izer , ACM authors can generate and post links on their homepage and in their institutional repository to enable visitors to download their articles from the ACM Digital Library free of charge. However, from a licensing point of view, it often remains unclear whether reuse is permissible. Hence, the goals of open access are only partially achieved. Authors also have the possibility of making articles published by ACM available in open access by availing of the author-pays option . In addition, in 2023, the ACM Council reiterated its intention to transition to a fully open access publishing model by 2026. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE): The IEEE Computer Society is the section of the professional society IEEE that is responsible for computer science and engineering. It acts as a publisher for scholarly journals and conference proceedings. Open access is available in hybrid journals , and especially in the open access megajournal IEEE Access . However, there are no explicit possibilities of publishing articles in open access in IEEE conference proceedings. Some commercial publishers offer authors the option of paying a fee ( article processing charge, APC ) to make individual articles available in open access ( ACM Author Gateway ; Lecture Notes in Computer Science ). This hybrid publishing model, which is practised by many publishers in the journals area, has thus also become established to a certain extent in the area of conference proceedings. The provision of open access to data and software is an important step towards transparency of scientific works. These open data and software allow results and experiments to be reproduced to a certain degree. In the field of computer science, so-called artefact evaluations have become established both in the area of conferences and of journals, and related data are very often made freely accessible. Open Access Journals As of March 2024, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listed 554 entries under the keyword Computer Science . Important open access journals include: IEEE Access DOAJ IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) Journal of Graph Drawing Algorithms and Applications (JGAA) Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) Journal of Spatial Information Science (JOSIS) Journal on Satisfiability, Boolean Modeling and Computation (JSAT) Logical Methods in Computer Science (LMCS) PeerJ Computer Science Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB) What are Open Access Journals? Find an introduction here. Practical Tip Publishing Open Access: How to evaluate a journal's quality 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 3,220 titles under the keyword Computer Science . Because of the conference culture in computer science, the majority of open access books are conference proceedings. Purely monographic works are rarely published in open access. The following list contains the most important conference proceedings series in computer science: CEUR Workshop Proceedings Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science (EPTCS) JMLR Proceedings Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) (Springer; hybrid via Open Choice) Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI) Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs) Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs) Procedia Computer Science (Elsevier) Proceedings of Machine Learning Research (PMLR) USENIX Although DOAB and OAPEN list a number of open access books in computer science and its subfields, they are currently very incomplete in relation to open access conference proceedings. Disciplinary Repositories The following repositories – both transdisciplinary repositories and repositories specialising in a single subfield of computer science – enable access to preprints and post-prints of works made available by the authors. As the latter versions often contain further details (e.g., technical proof), they are often consulted or cited for more in-depth engagement with a topic: arXiv/CoRR bioRxiv Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity (ECCC) HAL IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive 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 Conference management systems play an important role in the scientific self-or­ganisation of conferences in the field of computer sciences. That such systems are available in open access or free of charge is crucial in the planning and orga­nising of conferences and workshops. Although there is no concrete link as such between open access and the availability of conference management systems, the latter aspect must be kept in mind when developing future open access of­ferings, because conference management systems are where the metadata and the draft versions of contributions are collected. The following is an exemplary list of conference management systems that are frequently used in computer science: EasyChair (free of charge but not open access) HotCRP (free of charge but not open access) SoftConf START V2 (fee based) Searches in Computer Science Because of the focus on conference publications in its publication culture, the field of computer science is inadequately covered in trans-disciplinary indexing and search systems that are based on journals. The dblp computer science bib­liography , which was created in the early 1990s, established itself as an open access – and by now broad-scope – bibliographic service. It enables searches for individual authors and especially for conferences and journals in computer science. The following is a list of relevant search services for computer science: ACM Digital Library citeseerx Computer.org dblp IEEE Xplore Semantic Scholar Open Science in Computer Science Computer science acts as a technological trailblazer for the current debate on open science. The computer scientist Ben Shneiderman played a decisive role in coining the term Science 2.0 ( Shneiderman, 2008 ) and opened the debate on the technological renewal of science processes. There is a particular focus on open research data . Since 2011, more and more conferences (especially on software engineering) have established special committees to evaluate so-called research artefacts. These committees ensure that artefacts submitted along with a research paper are consistent with the paper and are complete, well documented, and easily reusable. Papers whose artefacts have been successfully evaluated are awarded an “Artefacts Evaluated” badge. Several publishers, for example ACM and Schloss Dagstuhl , have already implemented this procedure. Software developers frequently use GitHub as a software repository. GitHub is a commercial service used by software developers for administering different versions of software development projects. The reproducibility of results also plays a role in various journals that have specialised in the publication of software, algorithms, proof procedures, and data. They include, for example, the Journal of Open Source Software the Archive of Formal Proofs the journal Image Processing On Line the journal Data Another initiative that originated in – but is not limited to – computer science is the project Software Heritage , which has set itself the task of archiving and preserving software in source code form. As of October 2024, Software Heritage had archived over 327 million projects. open-access.network ( CC BY 4.0 International ) References Jagadish, H. V. (2008). The conference reviewing crisis and a proposed solution. ACM SIGMOD Record, 37 (3), 40–45., https://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1462571.1462582 Konstan, J. A. & Davidson, J. W. (2015). Should conferences meet journals and where? a proposal for "PACM". Communications of the ACM 58(9), 5. https://doi.org/10.1145/2811400 Shneiderman, B. (2008. March 2008). Science 2.0. Science, 319 (5868), 1349–1350. https://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1153539 Vardi, M.Y. (2009). Conferences vs. journals in computing research. Communications of the ACM , 52 (5), 5., https://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1506409.1506410 Vardi, M. Y. (2010). Revisiting the publication culture in computing research. Communications of the ACM, 53 (3), 5., https://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1666420.1666421 Content editors of this page: Dr Michael Wagner, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics , and Dr Marc Herbstritt, University of Freiburg (Last updated: December 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 Economics and Business Studies Open access is always also part of the publishing market and of publishing behaviour as a whole. It is of particular relevance for economics and business studies because of the strong preprint culture in these fields. As a rule, these works, which have not yet undergone peer review at a scholarly journal, are published as working papers or discussion papers – for the most part by economic and business studies institutes or faculties – and are usually freely accessible. Most journal articles in economics and business studies have therefore already been published as working papers ( Baumann & Wohlrabe, 2020 ), which are freely accessible via disciplinary repositories or indexing databases such as SSRN , RePEc , or EconStor . Despite the preprint culture in economics and business studies, journal articles are still the main publication format. There is a strong fixation on publishing-performance rankings based on journal quality ratings (such as those produced, e.g., by Forschungsmonitoring at ETH Zurich for Handelsblatt or WirtschaftsWoche). The main publishers of economics and business studies journals are Elsevier , Springer , and Wiley . Most of these journals are subscription or hybrid journals. The growing trend towards supra-regional and national transformative agreements both in Germany (e.g. the DEAL agreements; see marketwatch ) and internationally has therefore led to an increase in open access articles in hybrid journals of economics and business studies. This effect is considerably stronger than the increase in open access articles in gold open access journals. The preprint culture is more pronounced in economics than in business studies, and the share of English-language publications, which dominate in both disciplines, is even higher in economics than in business studies. Open Access Journals Open access journals still play quite a minor role in economics and business studies. Although their share has grown proportionally in recent years, it is still in the single-digit percentage range compared with all other journals ( Laakso & Björk, 2021 ). There are various reasons for this, for example, the great importance of rankings, which especially favour established (subscription) journals, and, at the same time, the low level of willingness on the part of authors to publish in open access journals that levy article processing charges ( APCs ; Severin et al., 2018 ). The following open access journals play a relevant role for economics and business research, especially in Germany (publishing institution or publisher in parentheses): Quantitative Economics DOAJ (Econometric Society) Theoretical Economics DOAJ (Econometric Society) Health Economics Review DOAJ (Springer) Journal for Labour Market Research ​​​​​​​ DOAJ (IAB, Springer) Energy Strategy Reviews DOAJ (Elsevier) Environmental Research Letters DOAJ (IOP) Economics E-Journal DOAJ (DeGruyter) Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik (De Gruyter Brill) German Economic Review (Verein für Socialpolitik, De Gruyter Brill) Schmalenbach Journal of Business Research (VHB/Schmalenbach-Gesellschaft, Springer) German Journal of Agricultural Economics DOAJ (Gewisola, TIP Open Publishing) Wirtschaftsdienst DOAJ (ZBW, Springer) Intereconomics DOAJ (ZBW, Springer) It is interesting to note that over half of the above-mentioned journals do not levy any APCs, and thus follow a diamond open access business model. Instead, the publication costs are borne by the institutions or professional associations that publish them. This may be due to the fact that, in contrast to the natural and life sciences, there is no distinctive APC culture in economics and business studies, or that the payment of APCs is less widespread in these fields ( Borrego 2023 ). For some years now, an increasing number of economics and business studies journals have been converted to a diamond open access model. This has been done in two different ways: first, using commercial transformative models such as “subscribe to open”, via which, for example, the publisher De Gruyter Brill has made several economics and business studies journals open access . Second, the conversion to open access has increasingly taken place in non-commercial contexts in which the title rights in a journal are not held by a commercial publisher but by a scientific institution or a professional association. One example is the Leibniz Information Centre for Economics’ (ZBW) Open Library Economics , via which economics and business studies journals are also being converted to 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 ) What are Open Access Books? Find an introduction here. open-access.network (2026) ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Open Access Books The importance of publishers’ monographs for economics and business studies research has decreased steadily in recent years. They currently play only a minor role, for example in the form of edited collections or as popular-science publications of well-known professors. Textbooks are an exception in this regard, and they are still widely used by students. However, because of their high turnover in the traditional sales model (also outside library budgets), it is difficult to transform textbooks and popular-science titles into an open access business model . The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) provides a good overview of the open access book segment in the areas of economics, business, management, and finance. It lists several hundred open access books from these fields. The further financing of open access books is increasingly supported by institutional open access monograph funds , which are being established at more and more academic institutions (see also the Focus Group on Open Access Monograph Funds ). Disciplinary Repositories There is not just “the one” disciplinary repository in economics and business studies. Rather, several relevant venues have arisen over the years that are of relevance not only, but primarily, for the culture of publishing preprints (or working papers) that exists in these disciplines. The main repositories in economics and business studies include: SSRN : Although the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), which is owned by Elsevier, covers a broader range of disciplines than just economics and business studies, it is considered the largest disciplinary repository in these fields. Around 1.6 million full texts are available in open access, of which over half are from economics and business studies. EconStor : This publication server, which is provided by ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, holds over 300,000 open access full texts. For the most part, these are working papers, but holdings also include conference proceedings and journal articles. EconStor publications are also indexed in RePEc as well as in Google Scholar and EconBiz . AgEcon Search : This disciplinary repository is operated by the University of Minnesota and funded mainly by the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association . It holds around 200,000 freely accessible full texts, mainly from the areas of agricultural and applied economics. All publications in AgEcon Search are also indexed in RePEc . MPRA : Hosted by Munich University Library, the Munich Personal RePEc Archive (MPRA) holds over 60,000 economics and business studies publications from all over the world. As a rule, publications are not deposited by institutions or publishers but rather self-archived by individual researchers and then released by an editorial team and indexed in RePEc . The Open Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) also 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 ) Practical Tip Finding Open Access Literature (in German) Open Access Helpdesk You are welcome to contact our helpdesk if 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 Many researchers in business studies and especially in economics are familiar with the platform RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) . It is a mixture of a union catalogue, a registry of institutions , and a ranking system. The circa 5 million publications listed in the union catalogue are indexed on a decentralized basis by the academic institutions and scholarly publishers themselves. With the help of automatic citation analysis and download statistics as well as information supplied by over 70,000 researchers worldwide who are registered with the RePEc author service, RePEc produces, among other things, rankings of researchers, academic institutions, and scholarly journals. The entire service is non-commercial and free of charge and is operated on a voluntary basis by various economists on distributed servers. The search portal EconBiz , which is provided by ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics , indexes over 10 million publications; searches can be restricted to open access full texts. In addition, it offers a calendar of events (scholarly conferences, summer schools, etc.) in economics and business studies worldwide. Open Science in Economics and Business Studies Other aspects of open science that are of relevance to economics and business studies include, in particular, research data , which are increasingly being made available in open access and according to the FAIR Principles . In Germany, the German Data Forum (RatSWD), among others, is engaged in the further development of this area. In this pursuit, it has, for example, drawn up standards for access to research data centres . In addition, as part of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) , there are also consortia from the economic sciences, for example, KonsortSWD and BERD . ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics in particular, is also engaged in the further development of open science in economics and business studies, for example through its research activities , the annual Open Science Conference , and extensive marketing activities . Furthermore, its Open Economics Guide is a central point of reference on the topic of open science for researchers from the fields of economics and business studies. open-access.network ( CC BY 4.0 International ) References Baumann, A., & Wohlrabe, K. (2020). Where have all the working papers gone? Evidence from four major economics working paper series (CESifo Working Paper No. 8328). Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute (CESifo). https://hdl.handle.net/10419/219146 Borrego, Á. (2023). Article processing charges for open access journal publishing: A review. Learned Publishing, 36(3), 359–378. https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1558 Laakso, M., & Björk, B.-C. (2021). Open access journal publishing in the business disciplines: A closer look at the low uptake and discipline-specific considerations. https://doi.org/10.1177/09610006211006769 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, 7, 1925. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.17328.2 Content editor of this page: Olaf Siegert, Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (ZBW) (Last updated: August 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 and Self-Archiving Find an introduction here. Open Access in the Educational Sciences Although open access as a publishing form is established in educational sciences, it continues to play a somewhat secondary role compared with proprietary publications. Journal articles are the preferred form of publication in educational sciences (Schmidt-Hertha & Müller, 2020), followed by monographs, edited collections, and contributions to edited collections, which together make up around one third of the publication output in this field (Abs et al., 2020). According to the German Education Index ( FIS Bildung ) labelling, as of August 2025, the full-text versions of 42% of the publication output, 32% of the listed journal articles, ca. 58% of the listed monographs and edited collections, and ca. 61% of the listed contributions to edited collections in educational sciences in 2024 were freely available. The German Educational Research Association (GERA/DGfE) , one of the key institutions in educational sciences in the German-speaking area, supports a large number of open access initiatives, but it has not yet adopted a clear position on open access. A further overview of open access developments in the German-language educational sciences is provided in a dissertation by Bambey (2016) and journal articles by Rummler (2021) and Schindler and Rummler (2018) . Open Access Journals As of October 2025, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listed around 1,980 journals under the subject Education . Important German-language open access journals that are listed in the DOAJ include: bwp@ DOAJ Die Deutsche Schule doaj Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research (FQS) DOAJ Magazin Erwachsenenbildung.at DOAJ MedienPädagogik. Zeitschrift für Theorie und Praxis der Medienbildung DOAJ Zeitschrift für Hochschulentwicklung (ZFHE) DOAJ Zeitschrift für Weiterbildungsforschung DOAJ Important open access journals that are not listed in the DOAJ include: bildungsforschung PhyDid widerstreit-sachunterricht Die Österreichische Volkshochschule (ÖVH) on_education. Journal for Research and Debate Beiträge zur Lehrerinnen- und Lehrerbildung . Contributions up to and including 2013 and contributions from 2014 onwards can be found on peDOCS. Journal for Educational Research Online (JERO) journal für lehrerInnenbildung Erziehungswissenschaft Journals in the educational sciences are often published open access by committed individuals with the help of their institutions and through voluntary effort. For example, the German Youth Institute publishes the magazine IMPULSE . Although, as mentioned earlier, the German Educational Research Association (GERA/DGfE) has not yet adopted a clear position on open access, its journal, Erziehungswissenschaft , is published in diamond open access . In addition, the above-mentioned DOAJ-listed journal MedienPädagogik , which is published by GERA’s Media Education Division, is also diamond open access. In Austria, the Forum Neue Medien in der Lehre Austria publishes the journal Zeitschrift für Hochschulentwicklung in diamond open access. And in Switzerland, the Swiss Society for Research in Education (SSRE) also publishes the quadrilingual journal Swiss Journal of Educational Research in diamond open access. Some journals rely on support from funding agencies or sponsors. For example, the Magazin erwachsenenbildung.at is funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Women, Science and Research (BMFWF ), while the online journal bwp@ is run inter alia through a cooperation with wbv Media and with support from sponsors. 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 (2021) ( 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 October 2025, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) listed over 1,600 titles under the subject " Education ", and the OAPEN Library listed over 1.200 titles. Furthermore, peDOCS provides a good overview of series in educational sciences. And the German Education Index (FIS Bildung Literaturdatenbank) indexes open access monographs and contributions to edited collections. A large share of open access books in educational sciences are now published by university presses or institutional repositories (see Schindler & Rummler, 2018). Besides research reports and edited collections, these works include in particular monographic doctoral dissertations and habilitation theses. Although the German Educational Research Association (GERA/DGfE) has not yet adopted a clear position on open access, its divisions and committees publish various books and book series open access: Division 1 – Historical Education Research . Series: Jahrbuch Historische Bildungsforschung (Verlag Julius Klinkhardt) Division 7 – Vocational Education . Series: Jahrbuch der berufs- und wirtschaftspädagogischen Forschung (Verlag Barbara Budrich) Division 9 – Adult Education . Series: Schriftenreihe der Sektion Erwachsenenbildung (Verlag Barbara Budrich) The Gesellschaft für Medien in der Wissenschaft (GMW) published the conference proceedings series Medien in der Wissenschaft in open access with Waxmann Verlag until 2022. Furthermore, various publishers support the publication of open access books in educational sciences. They include Verlag Julius Klinkhardt , Barbara Budrich , Nomos , Beltz Juventa , wbv Media , transcript , Waxmann , and Werner-Hülsbusch-Verlag . Disciplinary Repositories The most important repositories in the educational sciences include: peDOCS : the disciplinary repository of DIPF – Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education for the areas educational research, educational science, and subject didactics. DIPFdocs : DIPF’s institutional repository. texte.online : publications on adult education of the German Institute for Adult Education (DIE) . Scripta Paedagogica Online : digital text archive on the history of education in the German-speaking area (holdings include, inter alia, journals, teacher registers, school programmes). VET Repository : the central repository of the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training – BIBB for literature in the area of research on vocational education and training (VET). An overview of relevant repositories is also 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 if 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 As a virtual specialised education library, the Education Research Portal is the central point of access for literature searches in (German-language) educational sciences. It is run by the Information Centre for Education (IZB) of DIPF – Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education in Frankfurt am Main. The development of the portal was funded by the German Research Foundation ( DFG ). The offering, which can be used free of charge, is divided into three sections, Literature & References, Research Data in Education, and Research Information: In the Literature & References section, users can conduct searches, report publications that are not yet indexed in the database, publish documents via peDOCS , or avail of the services of the Specialised Information Service for Educational Science and Research . The Research Data in Education section contains comprehensive studies in empirical education research that have been documented for the long term. In addition, there is a central access point to descriptive information about the studies (e.g. survey instruments used, research data collected, information material on research data management) . The Research Information section provides a thematic compilation of relevant Internet sources for and about science and research in the area of education . The Education Research Portal has been online since August 2005. Following a complete overhaul, it was relaunched in September 2017. Open Science in the Educational Sciences In educational sciences, there are also other movements in the area of open science beyond open access. For example, a special issue of the journal Erziehungswissenschaft , Issue 61 (2-2020), entitled: “ Neue Formen der Archivierung, Bereitstellung und Nachnutzung von Forschungsdaten ” [New Forms of Archiving, Providing, and Reusing Research Data], which brought together arguments on open science and open data, sparked a debate within educational sciences on new forms of research and data collection and the requirements that these models involve. The special issue also addressed discernible limitations and reservations, especially regarding data protection and the use of open research data and processes. Nonetheless, open science practices and forms of open access publishing will also change things in educational sciences, as the open handling of research data is supported in principle. The German Educational Research Association (GERA/DGfE), the Society for Empirical Educational Research ( Gesellschaft für Empirische Bildungsforschung, GEBF), and the Gesellschaft für Fachdidaktik (GFD) have published a joint statement with recommendations on the archiving, provision, and reuse of research data in the context of education and subject didactics research. At an international level, as of November 2025, the registry of research data repositories re3data listed 100 open research data portals and repositories under “educational research”. In the German-speaking area, the portal Forschungsdaten Bildung indexes research data via the German Network Educational Research Data (Verbund FDB) and provides information on sharing and managing research data in education research. Engagement with open science and the adaptation of open science to the disciplinary framework conditions and possibilities can increasingly be observed in educational sciences (van Dijk et al., 2021; Krammer & Svecnik, 2020; van der Zee & Reich, 2018). Furthermore, educational sciences are also influenced by the open educational resources (OER) movement. By explicitly calling for open access to education, educational opportunities, and educational materials, this thematic field follows the lead of historical pedagogical precursors (Deimann, 2020; Hug, 2014). In recent years, an increasing number of studies have investigated the innovations in the area of educational and informational practice. These studies emphasise, examine, and critically discuss the new ways of handling materials and infrastructures (Schön & Ebner, 2021; Heck et al., 2020; Deimann, 2020; Heinen et al., 2015). The website OERinfo provides regular German-language news and information on OER as well as a compilation of German-language OER directories and platforms (e.g. the OER-Repositorium Baden-Württemberg and twillo ) . These directories and platforms cover both the areas of school and adult education and the area of higher education. In Austria, an OER certificate ( OER-Zertifikat.at) has been introduced for higher education teachers and institutions (Schön et al., 2 023). open-access.network (2021) ( CC BY 4.0 International ) References Abs, H. J., Kuper, H., Cathleen, G., Ludwig, K., Hüfner, K., Radhoff, M., Ruberg, C., Kerst, C., Wolter, A., Gerecht, M., Krüger, H.-H., Sauerwein, M., Schultheiß, J., Schmidt-Hertha, B., Müller, M., Martini, R., & Stelter, A. (2020). Datenreport Erziehungswissenschaft 2020. Erstellt im Auftrag der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Erziehungswissenschaft (DGfE). Verlag Barbara Budrich. https://doi.org/10.25656/01:18987 Bambey, D. (2016). Fachliche Publikationskulturen und Open Access. Fächerübergreifende Entwicklungstendenzen und Spezifika der Erziehungswissenschaft und Bildungsforschung . https://doi.org/10.25656/01:12331 Deimann, M. (2020). Lernen mit Open Educational Resources. In H. M. Niegemann & A. Weinberger (Eds.), Handbuch Bildungstechnologie. Konzeption und Einsatz digitaler Lernumgebungen (pp. 699–708). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-54368-9_58 Heck, T., Kullmann, S., Hiebl, J., Schröder, N., Otto, D., & Sander, P. (2020). Designing Open Informational Ecosystems on the Concept of Open Educational Resources. Open Education Studies , 2 (1), 252–264. https://doi.org/10.1515/edu-2020-0130 Heinen, R., Kerres, M., & Schindler, C. (2015). Provisioning strong and weak OER: Requirements of open informational ecosystems. Proceedings of Open Education Global 2015 . https://doi.org/10.25656/01:18242 Hug, T. (2014). Bildung für alle – eine Neuauflage? Offenheit und Teilen in der Open Educational Resources (OER) Bewegung. In P. Missomelius (Ed.), Freie Bildungsmedien und digitale Archive. Medien - Wissen - Bildung (pp. 227–256). Innsbruck University Press. https://www.fachportal-paedagogik.de/literatur/vollanzeige.html?FId=1055764 Krammer, G., & Svecnik, E. (2020). Open Science als Beitrag zur Qualität in der Bildungsforschung. Zeitschrift für Bildungsforschung , 10 , 263–278. https://doi.org/10.1007/s35834-020-00286-z Rummler, K. (2021). Open Access Zeitschriften in den Bildungs- und Erziehungswissenschaften. Ausgewählte Aspekte zum Betrieb wissenschaftlicher Fachzeitschriften. Schweizerische Zeitschrift Für Bildungswissenschaften , 43 (1), 116–128. https://doi.org/10.24452/sjer.43.1.9 Schindler, C., & Rummler, K. (2018). Open Access in der Publikationslandschaft der Erziehungswissenschaft. Eine Sondierung mit Blick auf Monographien und Sammelwerke. Erziehungswissenschaft , 57 (29), 9–18. https://doi.org/10.3224/ezw.v29i2.02 Schmidt-Hertha, B., & Müller, M. (2020). Forschung und Publikationskulturen. In J. Abs, H. Kuper, & R. Martini (Eds.), Datenreport Erziehungswissenschaft 2020 . Verlag Barbara Budrich. https://doi.org/10.3224/84742419 Schön, S., & Ebner, M. (2021). Digital gestütztes Lernen in der Erwachsenenbildung - wo liegt die Innovation? In Egger, R. & Härtel, P. (Eds.), Bildung für alle? Für ein offenes und chancengerechtes, effizientes und kooperatives System des lebenslangen Lernens in Österreich (pp. 231–252). Springer VS. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-31054-7_12 Schön, S., Ebner, M., Berger, E., Brandhofer, G., Edelsbrunner, S., Gröblinger, O., Hackl, C., Jadin, T., Kopp, M., Neuböck, K., Proinger, J., Schmölz, A. & Steinbacher, H.P. (2023). Development of an Austrian OER certification for higher education institutions and their employees. In D. Otto, G. Scharnberg, M. Kerres, & O. Zawacki-Richter (Eds.), Distributet learning ecosystems. Springer VS. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38703-7_9 van der Zee, T., & Reich, J. (2018). Open Education Science. AERA Open , 4 (3). https://doi.org/10.1177/2332858418787466 van Dijk, W., Schratschneider, C., & Hart, S. A. (2021). Open Science in Education Sciences. Journal of Learning Disabilities , 54 (2), 139–152. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219420945267 Further Reading Mruck, K., Mey, G., Schön, S., Idensen, H., & Purgathofer, P. (2013). Offene Lehr- und Forschungsressourcen. Open Access und Open Educational Resources. In M. Ebner & S. Schön (Eds.), L3T. Lehrbuch für Lernen und Lehren mit Technologien (2. Auflage). https://doi.org/10.25656/01:8356 Schaffert, S. (2004). Kostenlose Online-Literatur der Bildungsforschung. P@psych E-Zine , 9 . https://www.stangl-taller.at/paedpsych/ezine/2004/schaffert04/ Content editors of this page: Dr Klaus Rummler, Zurich University of Teacher Education , Dr Christoph Schindler, Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education , and Dr Sandra Schön, Graz University of Technology (Last updated: 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 Engineering Open access is not yet as widespread in engineering as it is in other disciplines ( Piwowar et al., 2018 ). This is due in part to the fact that engineering papers with a strong scientific orientation are usually published in scholarly journals of other disciplines, for example, physics or chemistry . It is due also to the fact that research in the field of engineering is very industry-oriented, and in industry, the idea of making findings and knowledge accessible worldwide free of charge is met with great scepticism and misgivings. For this reason, relatively few engineering papers are published on discipline-specific preprint servers such as engrXiv . Authors do not want to endanger future possibilities of exploiting their findings as well as patents and licences – true to the motto: first patent, then publish. Furthermore, the majority of engineering papers are more application- than science-oriented and are published in trade journals, for example for the purpose of client acquisition, in which case they are often not published open access. Here, it is important to note that in engineering it is customary to publish research results in different formats for different target groups. This serves the purpose of transdisciplinary communication and should not be equated to self-plagiarism. However, when reusing published material, transparency should be maintained to avoid the appearance of deception. This can be done by means of notes regarding reuse. In addition, authors should correctly record multiple publications, translations, or identical new editions in their bibliographies to avoid giving the impression that the number of publications is higher than it actually is. Conference papers play a more important role in engineering than do journal articles. In contrast to the journal offerings of other disciplines, the number of conferences that publish their proceedings in open access is comparatively small. Smaller conferences in particular are discouraged by the often high book processing charges (BPCs) for conference proceedings or do not publish any collected proceedings at all. In engineering, increased emphasis is being placed on green open access – that is, the self-archiving of publications in repositories. This circumstance is favoured by the fact that many engineering conferences are organised by professional organisations, for example the IEEE or CIRP , and offer very good self-archiving options in their author agreements. Gold open access usually involves (high) publication costs and is therefore used less, despite the comparatively large funding amounts in the discipline. However, since the advent of the transformative agreements negotiated by Projekt DEAL , an increasing trend towards gold open access can be observed. Conference proceedings are often not covered by the DEAL agreements or other international initiatives (e.g. Plan S ). Thus, even though the share of open access articles in engineering is likely to increase as a result of these efforts, many conference papers will still not be able to be published in gold open access. OpenIng , a project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) , conducted a survey on the publication behaviour of engineers in the German-speaking area, which showed that although many researchers had an awareness of open access, it was not sufficient to change their publication behaviour. Reporting the survey findings, Elsner et al. (2019) noted that this was due inter alia to the fact that the organisational and policy framework at universities regarding when and how research could be published open access was unclear. Open Access Journals As of March 2024, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listed 1,724 entries under the subject " engineering ". Important open access journals include: Sensors IEEE Access IEEE Photonics Journal Bioactive Materials Engineering Science and Technology, an International Journal Engineering npj 2D Materials and Applications Optics Express Open access journals devoted specifically to engineering are quite rare. Many engineering articles are published in the journals of other disciplines, for example in the fields of materials science and physics, or in sub-fields of these disciplines, such as optics. The above selection should thus be regarded merely as a small sample of the journals in which engineering articles are published. Furthermore, scholarly conference papers or conference proceedings are not listed in the DOAJ, because they are not published as consecutive volumes in journal format. Thus, this DOAJ-based counting method leaves out many proceedings from engineering conferences published, for example, by Procedia CIRP , which play an important role in applied research but receive much less attention in the area of basic research. Although the series titles are often indexed with an ISSN in the literature databases, the contents are usually individual proceedings from a scholarly conference rather than an ongoing series in journal format. Despite these circumstances, the number of open access journals in engineering is steadily increasing. For example, around 100 journals in the portfolio of the open access publisher MDPI cover this field, as do 30 journals in the portfolio of SpringerOpen . Predatory publishing is a big problem, especially in engineering ( Shen & Björk, 2015 ), which further increases the scepticism towards open access in the discipline. Therefore, here, too, it is a matter of selecting the respective publication media with care – as dictated by the principles of good research practice – in order to avoid undesirable developments ( DFG, 2022 , Guideline 15). 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 some 10,061 titles under " engineering ", and the online library and publication platform OAPEN listed around 17,223 titles under " engineering ". The reason why the number of books listed under this search term in the DOAB and OAPEN is so high is that engineering is not a main category in these databases. Rather, it appears as an accompanying specialist field, for example: Acoustic & sound engineering Biochemical engineering Offshore engineering Energy technology & engineering Disciplinary Repositories The main repositories in engineering include: engrXiv : A preprint server for engineering and related fields, engrXiv is directed by a steering committee of engineers and members of the engineering librarian community. arXiv EESS : the Electrical Engineering and Systems Science archive on the e-print server arXiv 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 ) 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 Tools and Offerings Publish-Ing. is an open access platform for the publication of scientific papers in the field of engineering. The idea for publish-Ing. stems from the Conference on Production Systems and Logistics (CPSL), which was conducted for the first time in 2020 in collaboration with TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and University Library , the German Academic Association for Production Technology (WGP) , the Institute for Production Systems and Logistics (IFA) , and Leibniz Universität Hannover (LUH) . Publish-Ing. aims to establish a digital platform for researchers on which scientific papers can be published open access affordably and with minimal effort. All contributions are published by TIB and deposited in the Leibniz Universität Hannover Repository . In addition, the project OpenIng , which was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), developed services for engineers. These services are still usable after the project lifetime. One example is OA-Check , which researchers can use to check the open-access compatibility of their publications. References Elsner, C., Rosenke, N., Weber, M., Hoppe, C., Drößler, S., & Hermann, S. (2019). Von Bottom up zu Top down. Umfrage: Forschende der Ingenieurwissenschaften erwarten klare Rahmenbedingungen von den Hochschulleitungen bei Open Access und Open Educational Resources. o-bib - das offene Bibliotheksjournal , 6 (2), 80–91. https://doi.org/10.5282/o-bib/2019H2S80-91 German Research Foundation (DFG). (2022). Guidelines for safeguarding good research practice. Code of conduct (Revised Version 1.1.). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6472827 Meinel, C. (2013). ‚Selbstplagiat’ und gute wissenschaftliche Praxis . https://www.uni-regensburg.de/assets/universitaet/ombudspersonen/selbstplagiat-memo.pdf Piwowar, H., Priem, J., Larivière, V., Alperin, J. P., Matthias, L., Norlander, B., Farley, A., West, J., & Haustein, S. (2018). The state of OA: A large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles. PeerJ , 6 , e4375. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4375 Shen, C., & Björk, B.-C. (2015). ‘Predatory’ open access: A longitudinal study of article volumes and market characteristics. BMC Medicine , 13 , 230. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-015-0469-2 Further Reading Ezema, I. J. (2020). Gold route open access journals in engineering and technology: Analysis of research impact and implications for scholarly communication. Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, 96 . https://doi.org/10.29173/istl43 Content editors of this page: Peter Molitor and Eric Retzlaff, Fraunhofer-Informationszentrum Raum & Bau (IRB) (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 Linguistics Find an introduction here. Open Access in English and American Studies English and American studies refers here to a range of disciplines that, at German universities, are also known as Anglophone literature and cultures or British and American studies , and that may comprise different regionally oriented and inter­disciplinary cultural studies. The following information therefore refers in part also to British, Irish, American, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand studies, as well as to interdisciplinary research fields such as postcolonial studies. In addition to genuinely philological topics and research questions, and in line with the current self-perception of the disciplines on the English-studies continuum, the history, society, politics, cultural geography, mass media, and popular culture of the respective countries are also investigated using different metho­dological approaches. The spread and acceptance of forms of open access publishing has not quite been able to keep pace with this continuous thematic and disciplinary opening of the field of English and American studies. There are a variety of reasons for this, the main one being the publication culture in the humanities, which differs – sometimes to a large extent – from the distribution channels and work me­thods in the natural sciences. The exception here is linguistics , which is closer to the natural sciences, not only in terms of its methods but also its scientific communication practices. For example, the concept of preprints is widely known in linguistics. In the field of literary and cultural studies, commercial print publications still prevail, especially in the case of dissertations and monographs. Open access publications in English and American Studies are not usually financed through article processing charges ( APCs ) but rather through book publishing charges ( BPCs ). The publication of open access monographs is supported in various ways, for example through monograph funds at institutional or federal state level, publisher-side pledging initiatives such as Knowledge Unlatched , third-party funding, or professional associations’ membership fees. The consortially funded Open Library of Humanities has developed into an important infrastructure for open access journals . Its platform also hosts a whole range of journals from the field of English and American Studies. In addition, the French platform for humanities and social science research blogs Hypotheses , which is part of the portal OpenEdition , is used by numerous German institutes and scholars to publish their research works. Overall, the development of open access in English and American Studies is positive. Many authors, publishers, and research funding organisations are calling for, and support, the further development of the provision of open access to research results. The growing trend in the humanities towards publishing research results in the form of journal articles and special issues is also contributing to a more vital open access culture in English and American Studies. Open Access Journals As of May 2025, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listed 92 entries under the keywords “ Language and Literature: English language ”, 61 entries under “ Language and Literature: English literature ”, 20 entries under “ Language and Literature: American literature ”, 4 entries under “ History of Great Britain ”, 9 entries under “ History America: America ”, 2 entries under “ History America: United States ” and 3 entries under “ History America: United States local history ”. The subject classification in the DOAJ is not always precise. Some of the journals of relevance to English and American Studies are to be found under more general categories, such as Language and Literature . In the case of specific research interests, it is therefore worthwhile to use free search terms. There are also several high-quality journals that are not yet listed in the DOAJ. The numbers mentioned above are thus only reference values. Important open access journals include: Anglistik Journal for the Study of British Cultures Amerikastudien / American Studies New American Studies Journal: A Forum European Journal for American Studies Zeitschrift für Australienstudien/Australian Studies Journal Canada and Beyond European Journal of American Studies Review of Irish Studies in Europe Journal of Transnational American Studies On Culture Postcolonial Text Transformative Works and Cultures Many journals that for a long time were available only in printed form have retained the classic subscription model without an open access component for their (mainly additional) digital editions. A welcome tendency when transitioning from a print to a digital version can be observed in the case of the journals of the main professional associations (e.g., the German Association for the Study of English , the German Association for American Studies , and the German Association for Australian Studies ), almost all of which are now (additionally) available in open access. Some of these journals are still published by scholarly publishers, whereas others are published via the associations’ websites. By contrast, the journal of the European Association of American Studies , for example, has been published in open access since its foundation. On the other hand, some e-journals were successfully implemented at an early stage as scholar-led publications without the support of publishers. Besides free worldwide access, in particular the potential of web-based publishing (hyperlinks, integration of images and audio-visual sources) was recognised. These journals include, for example: in Germany, Erfurt Electronic Studies in English (1995–2011) and the American Studies Journal (since 1996); in the United Kingdom, Early Modern Literary Studies (since 1995); and in Canada, Romanticism on the Net (RoN) (since 1996). Open access is now also an established model among journals edited by early career researchers. The articles of the journals Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies (COPAS) (since 2000) and aspeers: emerging voices in american studies (dual-publishing model since 2008) have been published under a Creative Commons (CC) licence from the very beginning. 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 A search in the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) in May 2025 using the terms “ English literature ”, “ English language ”, and “ American literature ” yielded a total of 451 results. Numerous monographs were also found under the more general search terms “American Studies” (470 results) and “English Studies” (43 results). In addition, there are publications from the areas of postcolonial studies , literary studies , cultural studies , etc. Because the platform does not provide uniform content indexing, it is worthwhile using search terms to search for books on the research topic in question. In addition, the platform OAPEN provides direct access to many hundreds of titles under the aforementioned search terms. The increasing availability of such a wide range of open access books and documents has been a positive development in recent years. Important commercial publishers in the German-language context that provide noteworthy open access offerings for the scholarly communities in the field of English and American Studies include transcript , DeGruyter/Brill, and Peter Lang . Furthermore, several German university presses offer opportunities to publish monographs in open access. Examples include the series Göttinger Schriften zur Englischen Philologie , which is published by Göttingen University Press , and Berlin University Publishing. Most of these monographs and edited collections are now indexed by central platforms such as OAPEN and thus find their way into library indexing systems. It is likely that the number of open access books – and the number of scholars calling for open access – will continue to increase in the coming years. Not only have research funders such as the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) made the publication of research results in open access a prerequisite for funding, but also German initiatives, such as Enable! , or international initiatives, such as Knowledge Unlatched , have established themselves as additional catalysts. Internationally, many publishers, for example MIT Press, have changed or expanded their business models in favour of open access and now offer a large number of their titles under an open licence. Disciplinary Repositories The most important repositories for English and American Studies include: The Stacks , an interdisciplinary repository for the following disciplines: American Studies, English Studies, Anglophone postcolonial studies, Australian and New Zealand Studies, British and Irish Studies, and Canadian Studies, including all sub-fields. The repository is provided by the Specialised Information Service (SIS) Anglo-American Culture and is operated by Göttingen State and University Library. Besides self-archiving their publications (journal articles and monographs), scholars can also deposit previously unpublished works, for example conference papers, teaching materials, and conference programmes. All documents are made available in open access either immediately or after a freely selectable embargo period. The repository was awarded the current version of the DINI Certificate in 2021. Humanities Commons (CORE) , an interdisciplinary open access repository for the humanities, which is operated inter alia by the Modern Language Association (MLA). Its holdings also include grey literature (teaching materials, conference papers). GenderOpen , a disciplinary repository for gender studies operated by the Margherita von Brentano Center for Gender Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, the Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Women and Gender at Technische Universität Berlin. media/rep/ , a disciplinary repository for media studies and neighbouring disciplines, which is operated by the Institute for Media Studies in cooperation with Marburg University Library. CompaRe , a repository for comparative literature, which is maintained by the Specialised Information Service Comparative Literature. An overview of relevant repositories is provided by the Open Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) . The English Language and Literature Commons section of the database Digital Commons Network lists full-text articles from institutional repositories worldwide (with a focus on US institutions). 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 if 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 make available open access content of relevance to English and American studies. Open Science in English and American Studies Major open science initiatives, for example the German association Geistes- und kulturwissenschaftliche Forschungsinfrastrukturen e.V , are not usually discipline-specific, but rather are addressed to the humanities as a whole. Here, the term open science refers primarily to providing access to digital materials (historical sources, literary texts, language corpora) and preparing (mostly text-based) research data using digital tools and making them available in the long term (e.g., in the DARIAH-DE Repository ). Especially in research areas in which the object of research includes not only texts but also audiovisual sources, pioneer projects were conducted at an early stage on the Internet to benefit from the opportunities afforded by hypermedia and to enable free access and – especially also interdisciplinary – reusability . For example, the Rossetti Archive and the Victorian Web date back to the 1990s. Recent major edition projects include, for example, the Walt Whitman Archive and the James Joyce Digital Archive . In Germany, scholars in the field of digital humanities, and projects at scholarly libraries in particular, are forging new paths. So far, the anchoring of open science in the main professional associations has only partially been implemented, for example by the Digital American Studies Initiative (DASI) , a working group within the German Association for American Studies that organises, among other things, thematic discussion forums at the annual conferences. Potential for a central strategy for dealing with language- and text-based research data currently also lies in the humanities consortia (e.g., Text+ ) within the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) . open-access.network ( CC BY 4.0 International ) References Further Reading Blumesberger, S. (2023). FAIRe Forschungsdaten in den Geisteswissenschaften: Umfrage über Aufbereitung und Archivierung von Daten. o-bib – das offene Bibliotheksjournal. 10 (4). https://doi.org/10.5282/o-bib/5883 Dreher, L., Lang, I., & Oberländer, A. (2020). Bereitschaft zu Open Access in den Geisteswissenschaften. o-bib – das offene Bibliotheksjournal, 7 (2), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.5282/o-bib/5512 Elstermann, A. (2017). The power of digital publishing: Rethinking knowledge distribution in English philology. In A.-J. Zwierlein, J. Petzold, K. Boehm, & M. Decker (Eds.), Anglistentag 2017 Regensburg. Proceedings: Vol. XXXIX (pp. 39–50). Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. https://www.wvttrier.de/top/Proceedings_2017_WVT.pdf Eve, M. P. (2014). Open Access and the humanities. Contexts, controversies and the future . Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316161012 Fitzpatrick, K. (2011). Planned obsolescence: Publishing, technology, and the tuture of the academy. New York University Press. http://mcpress.media-commons.org/plannedobsolescence/ (Link leads to manuscript version with open peer review .) Projekt AuROA (2022). Publizieren und Open Access in den Geisteswissenschaften. Erkenntnisse aus dem Projekt AuROA zu den Stakeholdern im Publikationsprozess . Link: https://projekt-auroa.de/stakeholder/#perspektiven . 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, 7 , 1925. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.17328.2 Content editor of this page: Wiebke Kartheus, Greifswald University Library (last updated: May 2025)....