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  1. Editing Open Access Journal

    Intro Academic Publishing: Open Access Gold Source: based on Oberländer, A. (2020). Open Access – Es ist nicht alles Gold, was glänzt. In: Open Science. Von Daten zu Publikationen. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4018594 ( CC BY 4.0 International ) The key takeaways from this article are 1 An open access journal can be published in different ways: it can be run independently, published at a research performing organisation, or with the help of a publishing house. 2 When starting an open access journal, roles and responsibilities should be clearly defined from the very beginning. 3 Overlay journals use the technical infrastructure of preprint servers. As in the case of other types of journals, an editorial team takes care of other processes, for example peer review. Starting and Publishing an Open Access Journal Open access journals are freely available – immediately and to all interested parties. This has various advantages for authors, readers and the academic community. But how are open access journals published? And what should be considered when starting an open access journal? This article addresses important points that should be considered when starting and publishing an open access journal. Many of these points are also of relevance when converting an existing journal to open access ( Journal Flipping ). What are Open Access Journals? Find an introduction here. Converting Journals to Open Access Find here more information about "journal flipping" (the conversing of an existing journal to Open Access). Praxistipp Beitritt zum Editorial Board einer bestehenden Zeitschrift: Ja oder Nein? Diese Handreichung liefert Kriterien zur Entscheidungsfindung: https://zenodo.org/records/12801460 . Concept First of all, in view of the editorial effort required, you should consider whether publishing your own journal is plausible within the limits of your resources. You should also find out whether and to what extent existing journals already cover the subject area of your planned journal. To do so, you can consult, among other things, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) , the German Union Catalogue of Serials (ZDB) , and JSTOR . Against this backdrop, you should then consider whether starting a new journal actually makes sense ( Pilaar Birch, 2014; Blechl et al., 2016 ). Depending on the existing situation, it may be more plausible to assume a role in an existing journal or to encourage the conversion of a closed access journal to open access. In the case of a start-up, you should ask yourself the following questions, which will help you to develop a concept (Blechl et al., 2016; Pilaar Birch, 2014; van Edig & Rücknagel, 2021; Kaier & van Edig, 2020; K, 2021) : How can my journal fit in with the existing range of journals in terms of topic and target group? After finding a thematic niche in the existing range of journals, you should determine whether the interest of researchers in the niche topics is sufficient for the scope of a new journal. To this end, you should define and analyse the potential readership. If you conclude that the establishment of a journal makes sense, it is advisable to draft a mission statement, which will appear on the journal website. It should be the length of an abstract and should present the unique thematic features of your journal. What expenditure and revenue are to be expected? To help those thinking of starting an open access journal to develop a business plan, SPARC Europe provides the New Business Plan Toolkit for OA Journals . As a basis for negotiations with potential funders , it is advisable to plan the first three years in advance. The legal form of the journal should be considered, and a financial buffer should be included in the plan. It is advisable to draft a written concept with essential project information. How can the journal be run in the long term? Share the tasks and responsibilities so that as many team members as possible develop expertise in different areas. Document processes in order to conserve knowledge. Long-term preservation is important because it is the best way to ensure the permanent availability of the content. If your own institution does not operate a professional long-term preservation service of its own, all contributions should be archived externally. Examples of professional long-term preservation services include LOCKSS / CLOCKSS and Portico . Ideally, these services offer to transfer, or migrate, content into other (modern) formats should the existing formats become obsolete Content should be migrated into open, machine readable formats. Do I aspire to have an international reach? Decide on the language or languages in which your content and the information about your journal should be available. English-language journals tend to be noticed more and to reach a wider readership. If you want to publish in other languages, you should check whether your journal can reach your target group. What should I call my journal? Find a concise title and an abbreviation for your journal. Avoid special characters, such as ß . It is also important that the title is tailored to the desired target group. Via the serials directory UlrichsWeb , or other search engines, you can find out whether your desired title is still available. As UlrichsWeb is a subscription-based service, you should ask your library whether they can help you access it. Also for ethical reasons, the name should be chosen in such a way that it is not possible to confuse it with the names of other journals. Who exactly should the editor or the owner of the journal be? The editors determine the scientific focus of the journal and usually de­cide which contributions should be published. In many cases, the editors are scholars who work on a voluntary basis, However, some open access journals work with permanently employed editors. In most cases, how­ever, editorial boards act as editors. Editorial boards are often hierarchic­ally organised and divided into areas of responsibility (chief editor, mana­ging editor, handling editor, etc.). Further details can be found, for example, in Kaier und van Edig (2020) . The ownership of the journal may lie with the editors themselves, with institutions (e.g. universities or professional associations), or with publishers. How can I find co-publishers, members of the editorial board, authors, etc? Although renowned researchers often have only very little time to give, the participation of established academics in the editorial board is highly recommended in order to increase the visibility of your journal. You should therefore start searching as early as possible. Ideally, your edito­rial board should consist of individuals from different institutions, and – especially in the case of a journal with an international focus – it should include persons of different nationalities. It is important that the journal is affiliated with several stakeholders; too strong an affiliation with individual persons can lead to relationships of dependency. All members of the editorial board should be listed on the journal website with their full names, affiliations, email addresses, research focuses, and, if applicable, links to their websites. Especially in the start-up phase, an adequate number of high quality con­tributions by renowned authors can build up the reputation of a journal. Do some research, or ask around in professional circles, to find out who would be suitable as authors for your journal, and then actively approach them. You have good prospects of success especially with academics who have reached a point in their careers where they are no longer complete­ly dependent on publishing in already renowned journals. A further possibility is to begin with a small group of renowned contributors, who will attract other renowned contributors over time. It should be borne in mind that the reputation of a journal and its contributors still plays an important role in many disciplines. The Journal Impact Factor is still also of importance in some disciplines. However, a Journal Impact Factor cannot be obtained from the very start, but rather only after meeting various criteria, providing proof of a relatively long publishing history, and undergoing laborious evaluation. The high visibility of a journal ensures increased visibility of its articles. This also enhances the standing of the authors in – and possibly beyond – their disciplinary communities. Who is responsible for what? Responsibilities and competences should be clearly defined. This is especially important when several institutions are participating in the journal, or when external services are used. Clear roles and responsibilities are also important within the editorial board – this point is addressed in more detail in the Editorial Planning section below. How do I connect my journal to the open access community? Consider becoming a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) . For internationally oriented start-ups from the humanities and social sciences, membership of the Radical Open Access Collective is also an option. To fulfil recognised open access criteria with regard to access and reusability , your journal should comply with the following standards and requirements: Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities The Principles and the Technical Guidance and Requirements of Plan S The DOAJ Seal What contributions will my journal publish? The types of contributions that the journal will publish must be specified – for example research articles, systematic reviews and meta-analyses, or book reviews. It should be considered whether individual issues should have a thematic focus. It is advisable to make research data – for example measurement results or interview transcripts – available as supplementary materials to the contributions in your journal (Hrynaszkiewicz et al., 2020) . These data enable not only peer reviewers but also readers to better understand and check the contributions. It is advisable not only to "store" these data in the journal itself, but also to inform the authors about suitable data repositories such as Zenodo or the Registry of Research Data Repositories, re3data.org . What licensing aspects must be considered? Under what terms and conditions should the contributions be reusable? Authors should not transfer exclusive exploitation rights in their contri­butions to the publishing institution (e.g. a publisher). With regard to distribution and reuse, it is advisable to make contributions available under the current version of the Creative Commons Attribution licence, CC BY , because this licence type complies with Plan S and restricts reuse the least. In the case of other CC licence variants (e.g. CC BY-NC), possible negative effects must be considered. It should be transparently stated – in the metadata, on the landing page, and in the article itself – what licence is used. On our Open Access and Reuse page , you will find detailed information on open licences such as the Creative Commons licences. Further legal aspects are addressed on our Legal Questions pages. What quality assurance procedures (e.g. [open] peer review, editorial review) will be used? On what criteria should the quality assurance procedure be based? Peer review is the most well-known quality assurance procedure. It is still often conducted anonymously, for example in the following forms: Double-blind peer review: The reviewers do not know the names of the authors and vice versa. Single-blind peer review: The identities of the authors are known to the reviewers but not vice versa. However, open peer review procedures are becoming more common ( Ross-Hellauer, 2017 ), for example in the case of overlay journals . Also common are editorial reviews, where the assessment of the article is carried out by one or more members of the editorial staff ( Lange, 2021 ). When choosing a procedure, standard quality assurance practices in the field in which the journal is located should be taken into account. After all, the journal is dependent on the support of the community, and thus on its acceptance. You should also find out what staff capacities are needed for each procedure, whether these capacities are available, and whether enough reviewers can be found. In any case, precise assessment criteria should be defined, and a maxi­mum duration of the review process stipulated, which should not be longer than a few months. Research data, software, and other supple­mentary materials should be included in the first submission of the manuscript and made available to the reviewers. In the interest of transparency, the reasons for using the respective quality assurance procedures should be explained on the journal website. Moreover, you should consider offering authors the possibility of naming undesired reviewers. And finally, it is essential that you check submissions for plagiarism. Open source software for this purpose is uncommon. iThenticate.com is often mentioned as a suitable commercial plagiarism detection service. Is there a demand for an additional print edition? You should find out whether demand for an additional print addition exists in the field in which your journal will be located. Although, generally speaking, demand for print editions is declining, it still exists, for example, in the humanities, although even there it is declining further. Bear in mind that printing even a few copies makes demands on administrative capacities that should not be underestimated, and consider whether it is worth the effort. Consider also that some of the added value of the digital publication (e.g. the direct linking with data) will be lost, and that therefore the question arises of whether a print edition is in keeping with the times. How do I increase awareness of my journal? It is essential that the content of your journal is easily findable via indexing services and search engines. Contributions and comprehensive metadata should be exposed via interfaces such as OAI-PMH or SWORD immediately after publication, so that they can be automatically processed at repositories. This is not only in the interests of long-term preservation but also of visibility. Within the framework of the DOI registration of an article (addressed in detail in the Editorial Planning section ), Crossref and DataCite each provide a metadata schema. Metadata may be reused under a CC0 licence. Only with such visibility is there a prospect that the articles in your journals will be frequently cited, which is essential especially for the reputation of early career researchers. This is the only way of sustainably establishing the journal in professional circles. In addition, the following ways of increasing the visibility of your journal exist: News: Publish regular news relating to your journal. Newsletter: Many readers like to keep up to date by newsletter. Social media: Twitter and possibly Facebook are suitable platforms for publicising your content. Post-publication tools: These tools (e.g. the comments function) encourage your readers to interact with each other and to discuss your content. RSS feeds: With the help of RSS feeds, interested users can collect current notifications. This option is directly included in most content management systems, and just has to be configured. Blogs: Blog articles can supplement journal contributions and report on current topics. To facilitate the exchange of views, the inclusion of a comments function is recommended. Moreover, if appropriate, blog articles can be linked to journal contributions. It is important that communication with the scientific community functions well – concerns and interests of readers and authors should be collected and incorporated time and again into the substantive concept of the journal. It is advisable to publish the handling of readers’ concerns and interests on the website. All these measures result in (potential) readers and authors feeling that they are being addressed. These measures should be prepared in good time because potential staff members and funders will make their participation contingent upon your position on these points. In addition, the concept has an impact on all framework conditions and work processes and must therefore be defined so that the editorial process flows smoothly. What will happen to the content in the worst case? You should make a plan as to what will happen to the content should your journal cease to exist. For authors, readers, and the scientific record, it is extremely important that published content should remain available in the long term. This aspect was addressed as early as 2003 in the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. When registering DOIs, journals undertake to ensure that metadata and content will remain accessible via these identifers. Should a journal cease to operate, it should therefore be made clear whether the journal infrastructure can continue to make the published content avail­able or whether this is possible via a long-term archive or repository. In any case, a situation where the content disappears overnight must be avoided. Editorial Planning Before work can begin on the texts, several editorial framework conditions should be defined (Blechl et al., 2016; van Edig & Rücknagel, 2021; K, 2021) : Editorial Roles and Responsibilities Responsibilities and decision-making competences should be defined: What roles and levels exist in my/our journal (e.g. editorial board; editorial staff; copy editors and proofreaders; typesetters; main contact persons for the authors; if applicable, review board)? Besides the linguistic quality of the articles, attention should be paid to their visual appearance so that the journal will be perceived as reputable. Standard layouts should be specified for all file formats – various typesetting systems, for example LaTeX , provide support with this. Moreover, you should keep an eye on current developments, so that the layout of the journal remains contemporary. In principle, it is possible to outsource the typesetting, but that costs money. And finally, guidelines must be established for peer reviews, conflicts of interest, and scientific misconduct. The Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE) Guidelines can serve as a guide in this regard. Planning the Number of Contributions The number of contributions that will be published per year should be specified. To be recognised as a proper journal, at least five contributions a year are advisable. Even though, in many respects, open access journals without print editions have fewer constraints than their closed-access counterparts, it makes sense in terms of staff capacity to plan the number of contributions. It should be considered whether traditional, discrete, issues should be published, or whether contributions should be published on a rolling basis – that is, as soon as the editorial process is completed. If you decide against publishing discrete issues, the individual contributions should be consecutively numbered, and at least one contribution should be published per quarter. Manuscript Submission Guidelines The desired manuscript length should be specified for each contribution category. A policy that gives the authors precise manuscript submission guidelines and explains what must be observed (e.g. file format, structure, referencing style) is advisable. Ideally, publications should be provided in the following formats: HTML for good on-screen readability PDF/A for printing (by users themselves) XML for machine processing ePUB for ebook readers Furthermore, you have to decide whether multimedia presentations, tables, graphs, images, or audio materials will be possible. It must also be decided whether it will be possible to enrich texts with data or link them to data on other servers. Technical Implementation and Design of the Website It is advisable to choose a domain name that is easy to remember (possibly in consultation with the IT department of your institution). In order to be perceived as a reputable journal, a professional web design should be used (if necessary with the support of external partners). If you are publishing your journal with a publisher or at your institution, talk to them about this. When designing the website, it is essential to ensure that is barrier free, so that it can be used easily by people with hearing, visual, or motor disabilities. It is advisable to use the technical standard Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, Level AA . At least one of the formats used (HTML, PDF, etc.) should comply with this standard. Workflows of the Publication Process The editorial team should define internal workflows, including a timeline for editorial work (calls for submissions, peer reviews, copy editing, etc). Core elements should be clearly communicated to the authors. In addition, the authors should be kept informed of the current status of their submissions. Journal management software, such as OJS, provides support with this. Indexing and Integration into Value-Added Services To ensure the findability of content, your journal should be successfully integrated into value-added services such as the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) , the Web of Science , Scopus and Sherpa Romeo . To this end, you should submit an application to these services. If evaluation is successful, your journal will be indexed. For successful evaluation by these services, the respective criteria for acceptance must be observed. Bear in mind that it can take a long time for the evaluation process to be completed. It is important to provide transparent information on the journal, the publishers and editors, the website, and – in the case of non-English-language journals – metadata. Information on DOAJ compliance can be found her e. Information on other services can be found on their respective websites and in Chapter F of Blechl et al.’s German-language guide ( 2016 ). Some indexing services require that non-English-language contributions should also include an English-language title and abstract. You should apply for an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) for your journal via ISSN.org . If the title of your journal changes, you will have to request a new ISSN. As a rule, an ISSN is not assigned until the first issue has been published. It is advisable to enquire in advance whether the ISSN will be listed in the ISSN International Portal. If a regular print edition is not planned, you should apply only for an ISSN (Online). The ISSN assigned to the online version can also be used for print-on-demand issues. It is important that all contributions are assigned metadata, DOIs, and keywords. Further details can be found on page 7 and seq. of Blechl et al.’s German-language guide ( 2016 ). In order to achieve a maximum reach, all metadata should be OAI-PMH compliant , thereby enabling them to be harvested by disciplinary databases and search engines. Journal management systems, such as OJS, provide plugins for the automatic generation of OAI-PMH-compliant metadata. ORCiD IDs enable authors to be uniquely identified. Besides unique identification in the research context, this unique identification is also important for internal processes at the institutions where the authors work. You should therefore give authors the possibility of linking their articles to their ORCiD ID. ORCiD IDs can be registered free of charge. Via the Research Organization Registry ( ROR ), institutional affiliations can be uniquely identified by means of a persistent identifier. ROR IDs can be applied for free of charge. Metrics and Statistical Data In the interests of transparency, readers should be given access to journal-level citation metrics, such as the Journal Impact Factor (JIF), the Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP), and the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR). Moreover, it is advisable to also make article-level metrics (ALMs) available to enable readers to find out how many accesses or downloads an article receives. In addition, via so-called altmetrics, mentions of the contributions in social media and scholarly networks can be statistically analysed. Provided you use DOIs, OJS has a plugin for this. And finally, it is advisable to communicate the number of submitted, accepted, and rejected manuscripts, as well as the average time from submission to publication, so that authors know what processing time to expect. Notifications to Collecting Societies Authors of articles in digital journals can also receive royalties from collecting societies. In Germany and Austria, contributions must be assigned a counter from the collecting society VG Wort and must achieve a high number of accesses (e.g. VG Wort ). If you are interested, you can contact Literar Mechana in Austria or VG Wort in Germany. Practical tip Here you can find the slides of the Open Access Talk Founding journals - what do I need to think about? (in German) Practical tip Supporting Open Access – Practical Tips for Publishers and Journals (in German) gives concrete advice on how publishers can support open access. Practical tip The Wellcome Trust's Society Publishers Accelerating Open Access and Plan S toolkit provides tips on implementing Open Access and Plan S compliance. For OJS journals, the Public Knowledge Project provides the very useful Guide to Plan S compliance in OJS . Practical Tip The Open Access Journals Toolkit produced by DOAJ and OASPA is a good support for publishers of open access journals. It "covers topics across the entire journal development lifecycle and everyday operation, such as journal creation, costs, staffing, policy development, through to indexing and other technical aspects". Affiliation of the Journal Open access journals can be run within the framework of an existing offering or (largely) independently ( scholar-led publishing) . Affiliation with a publisher is one possibility; other options are to run the journal with the help of a university or a library or to publish it independently. Journals can also be published as so-called overlay journals (see below). When choosing a provider, the following aspects should be taken into account: Technical aspects Is there an editorial system? Are there possibilities to preserve content in the long term? Can the desired manuscript formats be processed? Financial aspects What does usage cost? What direct and indirect costs will arise (e.g. server operation, DOI assignment, personnel costs, external service providers)? Are the desired forms of financing supported? Service-related aspects What services are provided? What is the nature of the infrastructural integration with regard to metadata and the traceability of the content? Organisational and legal aspects Who will control the journal? Who will hold the rights in the journal title? If a publisher is involved: Will the publisher limit the open access orientation of the journal? Is separation from the publisher possible (e.g. regulation of the transfer of metadata and full texts)? When choosing a provider, you should critically assess your own resources – both in financial terms and with regard to the amount of work to be done ( van Edig & Rücknagel, 2021 ). You should not only ask yourself what and how much you can do yourself, but also how much freedom you wish to retain. If you want to publish your journal via a publisher, you should bear in mind that many things will be prescribed by the publisher – for example, the software, the fun­ding model, and minimum standards that the quality assurance procedure must fulfil. If the publisher’s requirements are in line with your ideas, cooperation may be beneficial. In other cases, cooperation with a publisher can severely restrict the freedom of the editors. Scholar-led publishing is an alternative to cooperation with a publisher. If you wish to publish your journal at an institution, it is advisable to find out whether the journal can be hosted on the institution’s web server, whether the institution can make journal management software available to you, or whether a professional hosting service would be an option ( Blechl et al., 2016 ). Some institutions offer a specialised advisory service for these questions (e.g. CeDiS , Freie Universität Berlin). Hosting services are also provided by some specialised information services, for example the Specialised Information Service Linguistics , the Specialised Information Service Germanistik im Netz , the Specialised Information Service Comparative Literature , and the Specialised Information Service Classics, Propylaeum ( van Edig & Rücknagel, 2021 ). Practice Tip: Scholar-Led Publishing Scholar-led publishing can be implemented cost-effectively by means of open source software such as Open Journal Systems (OJS) . OJS under­goes continual further development; the source code is freely available; and the software, which is also available in German, can be used free of charge. The application supports the entire process of online publishing (submission, review, copy editing and proofreading, publication, com­menting on published articles). Numerous templates, for example for communication with reviewers and authors, support the editorial work. Moreover, the software contains interfaces, so that metadata can easily be delivered to services such as the Directory of Open Access Journals ( Mruck et al., 2018 ). The German-language OJS Information Platform is the first contact point for German-speaking users when they have questions; it is also a place where OJS users interact. Further information can be found in the User Guide , which also includes an FAQ page. Accor­ding to Martin Paul Eve ( 2012 ), inexperienced OJS users with average technical competence should “budget in a fair few hours” to install and configure the software. You should also bear in mind that the amount of time needed to actually publish a journal should not be underestimated. In particular the preparation of the content is a challenge for scholar-led journals. Scholar-led projects that operate the technical infrastructure themselves should engage with formal standards (see Section 3.3 in Bosman et al., 2021 ). Alternatives to OJS are Janeway and PubSweet ( van Edig & Rücknagel, 2021 ). The focus group scholar-led.network also deals with the topic; members jointly search for suitable models, and share experiences. Editorial process at Open Journal Systems (OJS) Source: OJS-net.de Focus group: Scholar-led.network Feel free to discuss developments in Scholar-led.network with experts. Overlay Journals A further option is to publish the journal as an overlay journal. Overlay journals use the infrastructure of preprint servers , such as arXiv , that are already well established in some disciplines, for example mathematics and physics ( Schmeja, 2016 ). Authors deposit their papers (in the usual way) on arXiv or another preprint server and submit them from there to the overlay journal, which takes care of peer review. If the paper passes peer review, it is included in the journal – that is, the journal posts a link from its website to the preprint server, assigns a DOI, and, if applicable, attaches an editor’s comment to the article ( Schmeja, 2016 ). One of the first overlay journals was the mathematics journal Discrete Analysis , which was founded in 2015 ( Gowers, 2015 ). open-access.network ( CC BY 4.0 International ) In any case, when establishing an open access journal, it is very advisable to seek the advice of your institution’s open access officer. The Fair Open Access Alliance (FOAA) is a further suitable point of contact. FOAA is a group of scho­lars and librarians that propagates and promotes the principles of Fair Open Access. It provides support – financially and otherwise – for the establishment of new journals. The FOAA can be contacted here . Moreover, the TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and University Library , for example, provides the open access platform TIB Open Publishing , on which open access journals and conference proceedings can be published. And finally, it is advisable to engage with other publishers. The Free Journal Network (FJN) promotes scholarly journals run according to the principles of Fair Open Access , for example by sharing best practices and obtaining funding for its journals. By updating its acceptance criteria, it further aims to ensure that journals in the network continuously improve in quality. Open Access Helpdesk Ask your specific questions about Open Access here. Legal Aspects Find an introduction here. Open Access and funding organisations Find an introduction here. Covering Costs The production of open access journals in general, and overlay journals in particular ( Ball, 2015 ), is in part cheaper than print journals or toll-access electronic journals (Swan, 2016) . Besides savings from not having to print the journal, open access publishers also have savings, for example, from not having to handle subscriptions or identify (non-)authorised users. Because open source software, such as OJS, is often used to run the journal, or, in the case of overlay journals, the infrastructure of preprint servers is used, the software costs are usually low. Options for Covering the Costs of an Open Access Journal The options for covering the costs of an open access journal are as follows (Budapest Open Access Initiative, 2002; Blechl et al., 2016, van Edig & Rücknagel, 2021) : Funding from private, state, or disciplinary research funding organisations Funding from the institutions (e.g. universities) at which the authors are employed Cross-financing, for example by conferences Consortial funding (see Knowledge Unlatched or projects such as KOALA) Donations (e.g. from institutions, individuals, crowdfunding) Advertising revenue (to this end, draw up an advertising policy) Article processing charges (APCs) payable by authors or their institutions. As these charges create barriers for authors, other funding options should be chosen where possible. It is important to provide exact details of how the costs arise and of the APC per contribution. Moreover, the time point of invoicing should be clearly communicated. Discounts, for example for authors from low-wage countries, should be considered. Especially when you want to avoid costs for authors, it is very advisable to seek support from research funding organisations or consortial funding. Details of the funding model used by the journal should also be provided on the website. References Ball, P. (2015). The journal that publishes no papers. Mathematics journal ‘overlays’ arXiv preprint server . Nature. 526 , 146. https://www.nature.com/news/polopoly_fs/1.18444!/menu/main/topColumns/topLeftColumn/pdf/526146a.pdf Blechl, G., Ferus, A., Gorraiz, J., Haas, I., Haslinger, D., Holzner, B., Schiller, R., Schmidt, N., & Stöger, H. (2016). Checkliste zur Herausgabe von Open Access Zeitschriften an Forschungseinrichtungen (Version 2) . Open Access Netzwerk Austria (OANA). https://www.akbild.ac.at/de/forschung/open-access/die-ag-open-access/OANAChecklisteOAJournals_Version2.pdf Bosman, J., Frantsvåg, J. E., Kramer, B., Langlais, P.-C., & Proudman, V. (2021). The OA Diamond Journals Study. Exploring collaborative community-driven publishing models. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4558704 Budapest Open Access Initiative . (2002). https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/translations/german-translation Eve, M. P. (2012, July 11). Starting an Open Access Journal: a step-by-step guide part 2. Eve.Gd . https://eve.gd/2012/07/11/starting-an-open-access-journal-a-step-by-step-guide-part-2/ Gowers, T. (2015, September 10). Discrete Analysis - an arXiv overlay journal. Gowers’s Weblog . https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-an-arxiv-overlay-journal/ Hrynaszkiewicz, I., Simons, N., Hussain, A., Grant, R., & Goudie, S. (2020). Developing a research data policy framework for all journals and publishers. Data Science Journal , 19 (1), 5. https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2020-005 K, S. (2021, July 7). How to Start an Open-Access Journal. Typeset.io . https://typeset.io/resources/how-to-start-an-open-access-journal/ Kaier, C., & van Edig, X. (2020). Publizieren in wissenschaftlichen Zeitschriften. In K. Lackner, L. Schilhan, & C. Kaier (Eds.), Publikationsberatung an Universitäten (pp. 53–78). transcript. https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839450727-004 Lange, J. (2021, July 28). Scholarly Journal Publishing Guide. Resources for McGill journal editors . https://libraryguides.mcgill.ca/journalpublishing/typesofreview Mruck, K., Mey, G., & Muhle, F. (2018). Wissenschaft als Publikationspraxis. In Eigenregie verlegte Zeitschriften: das Beispiel Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research (FQS). Erziehungswissenschaft , 57 (29), 43–51. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.3224/ezw.v29i2.06 Pilaar Birch, S. (2014, September 18). Essential Guide: How to start an Open Access journal in five steps. LSE Impact Blog . https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/09/18/how-to-start-an-open-access-journal/ Ross-Hellauer, T. (2017). What is open peer review? A systematic review. F1000 Research . https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.11369.2 Schmeja, S. (2016). arXiv-Overlay-Journals: Das Beste aus zwei Welten. TIB Blog . https://blogs.tib.eu/wp/tib/2016/08/17/arxiv-overlay-journals-das-beste-aus-zwei-welten/ Swan, A. (2016). The costs and benefits to the research community of Open Access: A briefing paper . PASTEUR4OA. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.51867 van Edig, X., & Rücknagel, J. (2021, May 27). Open-Access-Zeitschriften gründen – woran muss ich denken? Open Access Talk. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4836220 Further Reading Bakker, C. (2012). Developing open access journals: a practical guide by David J. Solomon. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication 1(1). https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.1028 Birch, S.P. (2014, September 18). Essential guide: how to start an Open Access journal in five steps. Impact of Social Sciences. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/09/18/how-to-start-an-open-access-journal/ Hansen, C. R., Thestrup, J. B., Riise, R. R., Iversen, R. K. M., & Johnsen, S. S. (2023). An offer the journal couldn’t refuse. How a Danish collaborative project paves the way for DOAJ inclusion. Nordic Perspectives on Open Science , 8 . https://doi.org/10.7557/11.7001 Henkes, L. M., & Holscher Blackman, K. (2025). Wissenschaftliches Publizieren neu denken. Blaupause für gemeinschaftliches und faires Diamond Open Access . ELADOAH. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17240865 Jamali, H. R., Wakeling, S., & Abbasi, A. (2022). Why do journals discontinue? A study of Australian ceased journals. Learned Publishing , 35 (2), 219–228. https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1448 Mruck, K., Mey, G., & Muhle, F. (2018). Wissenschaft als Publikationspraxis. In Eigenregie verlegte Zeitschriften: das Beispiel Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research (FQS). Erziehungswissenschaft, 29(2), 13-14. https://doi.org/10.3224/ezw.v29i2.06 Open Access Directory (2019). OA journal business models. http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/OA_journal_business_models Shieber, S. (2013, November 21). Thoughts on founding open-access journals. The Occasional Pamphlet. http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2013/11/21/thoughts-on-founding-open-access-journals/ Wenaas, L. (2021). Attracting new users or business as usual? A case study of converting academic subscription-based journals to open access. Quantitative Science Studies , 2 (2), 474–495. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00126...

  2. History of the Open Access Movement

    1991–2003: Beginnings of the Open Access Movement 1991 Paul Ginsparg founds the arXiv archive for physics preprints at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LAN-L) to make preprints in physics freely available. 1995 During what becomes known as the serials crisis in the 1990s, the rising costs of acquiring scholarly literature lead to a burden on the acquisition budgets of scholarly libraries, and thus, in many cases, to a deterioration in the supply of literature. Besides rising journal prices, the crisis has also been caused by the fact that more and more universities and scientific societies have outsourced the publishing of their publications to commercial publishers. Journal literature is particularly affected, which is why this development is also referred to as the serials crisis. Later, the crisis also takes hold in the area of monographs. 1999 Biomed Central (BMC), the first open access publisher, is founded by Vitek Tracz. In 2008, BMC is sold to Springer. The Open Archives Initiative (OAI), which promotes the development of technical standards for the interoperability of metadata, is founded. 2001 The first version of the Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) , an interface for the harvesting of data from repositories , is released. CERN and the University of Geneva hold the first OAI Workshop . This gives rise to an important conference of the same name in the area of open science, which has been organised every two years in Geneva since then. 2002 Scholars and scientists join forces in the international and transdisciplinary Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) , which has arisen from a meeting of the Open Society Institute (OSI) in Budapest. The 2002 BOAI Declaration states that "the literature that should be freely accessible online is that which scholars give to the world without expectation of payment". The nonprofit organisation Creative Commons is founded in the United States by Lawrence Lessig and others. It makes several copyright licences, known as Creative Commons licences , available to the public free of charge. Open Journal Systems , an open source software application for managing and publishing scholarly journals, is released by the Public Knowledge Project in Canada. SPARC Europe , an alliance of European science and research libraries, national libraries, library associations, and research institutions dedicated to advancing the open access movement, is founded. Its US counterpart, SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), was founded in 1998. Sherpa Romeo (today Open Policy Finder ) goes online. The database for publisher and journal open access policies aggregates and presents self-archiving permissions and conditions of rights given by publishers to authors of journal articles. It also provides statistics in this regard. 2003 The Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing is drafted by representatives of funding agencies, libraries, publishers, and scientists during a meeting on open access publishing held at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Focusing on biomedical research, the statement stresses the need for rapid and efficient dissemination of research results in accordance with the principles of open access. It also emphasises the opportunity (and the obligation) to share research results, ideas, and discoveries freely with the scientific community and the public. The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities is drafted within the framework of a conference on the development of new Web-based research environments (the first “Berlin Conference”) that was organised by the Max Planck Society and the European Cultural Heritage Online (ECHO) project. By signing the declaration, leading European and American research organisations and universities commit to supporting the further development of the notion of open access, for example, by encouraging researchers to publish their results in open access. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ ) is launched at Lund University in Sweden as a central directory for open access journals . The community-curated directory indexes high-quality, peer-reviewed open access journals. The Deutsche Initiative für Netzwerkinformation (German Initiative for Network Information, DINI) launches the first DINI certificate for open access repositories (DINI Certificate for Document and Publication Services) . It defines Web standards for publication services in order to ensure that open access literature in repositories is findable, archived, and accessible. 2004–2009: Open Access Infrastructure Grows 2004 Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) for academic documents on the Web is launched by Bielefeld University. The Austrian Science Fund (FWF) introduces its Open Access Policy , in which the publication of works in open access is highly recommended. 2006 The Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) developed by Nottingham University in collaboration with Lund University goes online. The directory lists academic open access repositories and is searchable by region and content, among other things. Sherpa Juliet (today Open Policy Finder ), a database of information concerning funders’ open access policies and requirements, is launched. 2007 The DFG-funded information platform open-access.net is launched. It collates information relating to open access and makes it available at a central location. The conference Open-Access-Tage (Open Access Days) takes place in Konstanz for the first time. Since then, it has been organised annually at alternating venues as a central conference on open access in the German-speaking area. The European Commission adopts a policy paper on open access . The paper fully supports open access and sets the goal of advancing it both at European level and at the level of the member states. The European Research Council (ERC) also adopts a pro-open-access position . 2008 The European Commission launches the Open Access Pilot for funded projects and supports them in covering the costs of open access publication fees . The Alliance of Science Organisations in Germany establishes the Priority Initiative “Digital Information“ to coordinate its activities in the area of open access. The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) requires recipients of funding grants to publish their research results in open access. The Austrian Science Fund (FWF) requires all research projects that it funds to make the research results from these projects available to the public in open access. Since then, FWF-funded scholars and scientists can obtain additional financial support within the framework of the programme to cover the costs of publishing peer-reviewed articles in open access. 2009 OpenAIRE (Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe) starts. The EU project aims to establish an electronic infrastructure responsible for archiving the research publications of all 27 EU member states, handling peer-reviewed articles, preprints, and conference publications, and managing research datasets. It has evolved out of the predecessor project, DRIVER, which built up a Europe-wide network of digital repositories. The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), an international association of repositories and repository networks from around the world, is founded. Its mission is to enhance the visibility and application of research outputs through collaboration across a global network of open access repositories. Like OpenAIRE, COAR has also evolved out of the EU project DRIVER. International Open Access Week takes place for the first time. During Open Access Week, numerous institutions worldwide organise events on open access in order to draw attention to the topic, to provide information about it, and to offer an opportunity for exchange. With a petition campaign, the so-called Heidelberg Appeal , the literary scholar Roland Reuss mobilises opposition against the digitisation of copyrighted works by Google Books and against open access. The Austrian Science Fund (FWF) launches Stand-Alone Publications , one of the first programmes worldwide providing funding for the publication of open access books. 2010–2015: Upswing in Open Access Funding and Promotion 2010 Within the framework of the EU-funded project OAPEN (Open Access in European Networks), the platform of the same name is launched to support and promote the transition to open access for academic books. The German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) launches the funding programme Open Access Publishing to support the establishment of open access publication funds at German universities, thereby decisively influencing developments in this area. As Fournier and Weihberg (2013) later note, during the transition from the subscription model to an open access model, substantial parts of the libraries’ acquisition budgets continue to be needed to finance licences. Therefore, the restructuring of (at least parts of) this budget, which is necessary to finance the transformation, can get off the ground only if additional funds to finance open access are made available for a limited period of time (p. 237). 2012 The statement of commitment to open access to scholarly journal literature in the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) Declaration is reaffirmed. At the same time, recommendations for the implementation of open access are formulated, especially with regard to guidelines, licensing, and open access infrastructure and services and their sustainability. OAPEN launches the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) for peer-reviewed open access books as a counterpart of DOAJ . Besides metadata, it offers links to full texts of the publications on the websites or in the repositories of the publishers. The Finch Report is published. It includes recommendations for UK research funders regarding the implementation of open access. The report strongly advocates promoting and favouring gold rather than green open access . It comes in for criticism because of this ( Abadal, 2014 ), as rising publication costs and the obligation to use a specific licence (CC BY licence) are feared. The Open Access Network Austria (OANA) is founded under the organisational umbrella of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and the Austrian University Conference (UNIKO). The network was renamed Open Science Network Austria in 2018, retaining the same acronym, and was replaced by the Open Science Austria platform in 2022. 2013 The catch-all repository Zenodo is launched. It is funded by the European Commission and maintained by CERN. 2014 With its Strategy for Open Access , the government of the German Federal State (Land) of Schleswig-Holstein endorses and promotes open access to the results of scientific research and the sources of cultural heritage. With a position paper on e-science, the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts of the German Federal State of Baden-Württemberg drafts a concept for the further development of the scientific infrastructure in the state ( Fachkonzept zur Weiterentwicklung der wissenschaftlichen Infrastruktur ) that addresses the area of open access, among other things. A self-archiving provision is added to the German Copyright Act ( Section 38 (4) UrhG ). It grants authors the inalienable right to make the accepted manuscript version of their journal articles freely available to the public, for example via an open access repository, 12 months after first publication. This applies when the contribution results from research activities at least half of which were financed by public funds, and the work appeared in a periodical that is published at least twice a year. Beneficiaries of the EU research funding programme Horizon 2020 are required to make publications resulting from funded projects available in open access. In addition, there is a requirement to publish the underlying research data in open access. However, there is an opt-out option in this regard (“as open as possible, as closed as necessary”; Landi et al., 2019 ). In Austria, one of the first national open access agreements worldwide is concluded. The Austrian Academic Library Consortium (KEMÖ) and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) negotiate the agreement with the publisher IOP Publishing. It is followed by further Austrian open access transformation agreements . The project e-infrastructures Austria is initiated to promote the coordinated development and further development of repository infrastructure in Austria. It is funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economy (BMWFW). 2015 The Arbeitskreis Open Access (AKOA), an official working group of the Conference of Swiss University Libraries (KUB/BU; successor: Swiss Library Network for Education and Research, SLiNER ), is established. The Berlin Senate issues an Open Access Strategy for the Federal State of Berlin . This strategy paper contributes to establishing open access to digital knowledge resources. With the Fraunhofer Open Access-Strategie 2020 , the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft unequivocally enshrines the principle of open access when publishing research results. Since 2016: Open Access Transformation Gathers Momentum 2016 The Initiative Open Access 2020 (OA2020) , a global alliance of scientific and research organisations, is founded. It is committed to accelerating the transition from the subscription system for scholarly publications to new open access models. The goal of the OA2020 initiative is to bring about a situation where research articles are published without embargo periods , and the costs behind their dissemination are transparent, just, and economically sustainable. The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) publishes a comprehensive open access strategy . The new measures are intended to contribute to establishing open access as a standard model of scholarly publishing in Germany. The Helmholtz Association adopts an Open Access Policy requesting employees to make publications resulting from their work for the Helmholtz Association openly accessible and reusable. The Leibniz Association adopts an Open Access Policy in which it enshrines open access as an important component in creating a culture of academic transparency. The recommendations for the implementation of open access in Austria are published by the “National Strategy” working group of the Open Science Network Austria (OANA). The declared aim is to achieve 100% open access for scholarly publications by 2025. 2017 The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) , a network of organisations committed to helping to secure the future of infrastructure and services in the area of open science, is founded. The Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and its state scientific institutions pool their activities in the areas of open access and open science and develop the cross-university strategy Hamburg Open Science (HOS) . The project Austrian Transition to Open Access (AT2OA) starts. Funded by the Austrian Ministry of Education, Science and Research, its aims are to support the transformation of scientific publications from closed to open access and to implement measures to support this transformation. In Switzerland, a national open access-strategy is adopted. It provides that all scientific publications resulting from publicly funded research should be available in open access by 2024. 2018 Science Europe and 11 national research funding organisations join forces to form cOAlition S . With the support of the European Commission, cOAlition S publishes Plan S , which provides that scholarly publications on the results of research funded by grants provided by member organisations of cOAlition S must be made immediately available in open access without embargo. The publications may either be published on open access platforms or in open access journals or be made immediately available in open access repositories that fulfil the necessary preconditions. The German Federal State of Thuringia drafts a state-wide Strategy for the Digital Society with the aim of establishing open access at Thuringia’s universities, among other things. 2019 Projekt DEAL concludes “publish and read “agreements with major scholarly publishers that include, for the first time, an open access component. The project was initiated in 2014 by the German Rectors’ Conference (HRK) on behalf of the Alliance of German Science Organisations. The goal of Projekt DEAL is to conclude nationwide licensing agreements for the complete e-journal portfolios of major scholarly publishers. A comprehensive consortial agreement is concluded with Wiley in early 2019 and with Springer Nature one year later, in 2020. The agreements grant the participating institutions reading access to around 1,900 Wiley and Springer Nature journals and enable authors affiliated with these insitutions to avail of the journals’ open access option without additional costs. The German Federal State of Brandenburg develops an Open Access Strategy . Funded by the Ministry of Economics, the strategy describes how open access can be substantially expanded. 2020 The German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) grants an allowance for the funding of open access publication costs and provides targeted support for...

  3. How do I operate a repository?

    Intro Publishing in Repositories Source: based on Koch, M. (2015). Publizieren über das Repositorium der Leibniz Universität Hannover. TIB Blog The key takeaways from this article are 1 To create a repository , you need, among other things, suitable software. Most software options are open source and usable free of charge. 2 You should publicise and anchor your repository well in your institution. 3 It is important that you integrate your repository well in order to meaningfully embed it into value-added services. This integration is also of central importance for the findability and visibility of the deposited documents. Key Questions A number of things must be considered when building and operating repositories . The present article addresses the following key questions: How do I create the basis for a repository? How can I publicise a repository and recruit content? What legal requirements must I observe? How do I integrate my repository with other services? Creating the Basis What are Repositories? Find an introduction here. Focus group Self-Archiving Feel free to discuss developments in Self-Archiving with experts. Helpdesk Our helpdesk team will be happy to advise you on questions about Open Access. Plan S Repository Self-Assessment Tool Using this tool from OpenDOAR, repository operators can verify that their repository complies with Plan S requirements. Beringer and Arning's (2020) German-language guide to building open access publication platforms provides a good initial overview of how to build repositories. To start a repository, you basically need a server and suitable software. What setting up and operating a repository entails – especially from a technical point of view – should not be underestimated. If the institution at which the reposito­ry is to be located does not have IT staff who are qualified to build a repository, it is advisable to use external service providers such as libraries or library consortia. In the German state of Baden-Württemberg, for example, various repositories are hosted by BSZ and in the states of Berlin und Brandenburg by KOBV. The library network GBV is active in this field in the states of Bremen, Hamburg, Mecklenburg Western-Pomerania, Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Schleswig-Holstein, and Thuringia. In addition, there are commercial providers, such as OpenRepository. In Germany, most repository software options are open source, available free of charge, and have similar basic functionalities: They can make materials available after uploading and assign metadata to them. They can harvest metadata via various standardised interfaces (e.g., OAI-PMH ) and make them available. Commonly used applications for open access and research data repositories, university bibliographies, and digital collections include, for example, DSpace, EPrints, OPUS, Invenio/CDSware, and MyCoRe, whereas e-journal repositories work mostly with OJS (Weimar, 2020). The Deutsche Initiative für Netzwerkinformation (German Initiative for Network Information, DINI) provides an overview of which publication service is used by which platform. Moreover, in its DINI Certificate , it describes the technical and organisational requirements that repositories must meet (for more on this, see the section entitled How do I integrate my repository with other services? ). Although DINI certification might seem a long way off, especially in the initial phase of a repository, alignment with these requirements is expedient. Publicising a Repository & Recruiting Content The usefulness of repositories is not immediately clear to all researchers ( Euler, 2018 ). Especially in cases where authors are encouraged but not obliged to provide open access to their works, persuasion is necessary. So what can you do to motivate them to use your repository? Target researchers specifically Experience shows that public relations and open communication with researchers are suitable ways of publicising repositories and recruiting content ( Rodrigues et al., 2017 ). The more targeted the address is, the greater the prospects for success are ( Euler, 2018 ). Reach out to researchers who are making their work publicly available on their own homepages. Experience shows that they will quickly grasp the advantages of repositories. Moreover, these researchers are suited to the role of multipliers and can thus convince others to use the repository. The same goes for researchers who already have experience of open access. Many of them may not be aware of the role of multiplier, so reach out to them directly. The higher the reputation of the multiplier is, the greater their success tends to be. Anchor your repository within your institution or in specialist circles The attractiveness of an institutional or disciplinary repository increases when it is perceived as a networked service with added value for various target groups, for example, authors ( Müller & Scholze, 2012; Euler, 2018; Macgregor, 2020; Rodrigues et al., 2017 ). So, advertise your repository. Theoretically, the best way to fill repositories is for institutions to mandate that their scholars and scientists self-archive their research output in the institution’s repository. In Germany, as legislation stands, this is not feasible. However, the Higher Education Act of the State of Baden-Württemberg (section 44 subsection 6) entitles higher education institutions to oblige the members of their academic staff by statute to avail of the right to make scientific contributions that have been produced in the course of their official duties and have been published in a collection that appears periodically at least twice per year available to the public for non-commercial purposes upon expiry of one year after first publication. Thus, this form of mandate can be used by institutional repositories, at least in some cases. The situation is different in Switzerland and Austria, and in the case EU-funded projects. Institutions such as the University of St. Gallen and the University of Zurich oblige their researchers to provide open access to their works provided there are no legal impediments to doing so. Since 2020, the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) requires grantees to make all the results of the projects it funds available to the public in open access. The same principle applies to results of projects funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and to publications that result from EU-funded projects ( European Commission, 2021, p. 108 ). As a manager of an institutional repository, you should inform the university management on a regular basis about the current status of your repository. University managers who support open access are important strategic partners for managers of institutional repositories. Make sure that your repository has as wide an online presence as possible – institutional repositories should be visibly embedded in the institution’s website, while disciplinary repositories should be mentioned at web locations that are of central importance for the discipline in question. Use convincing arguments Base your arguments on the reasons in favour of open access (e.g., citation frequency, visibility, long-term availability). Also be aware of reservations towards open access, so that you can put forward convincing counter-arguments. Many institutions and organisations support open access. Mention this in conversation with researchers; also mention advocates who are relevant in the respective research contexts. Take advantage of the fact that project funding approvals are often subject to the condition that project-related publications must be made accessible free of charge. Repositories are ideally suited for this purpose. Make using the repository a pleasant experience Researchers often find keying data – especially metadata – into repositories laborious. You should therefore design these processes to be as time-effective as possible for researchers – or you should take the work off their hands. This will increase their willingness to use the repository ( Euler, 2018; Tobias, 2018; Voigt & Dittmann, 2019 ). Another possibility is to integrate the repository with services in which the information has already been deposited (see also Müller & Scholze, 2012; Macgregor, 2020; Rodrigues et al., 2017 ), for example, the university’s annual bibliography or a research information system. In this way, less data, or no data at all, have to deposited manually. To support their researchers, many institutions, including the University of Augsburg and the University of Konstanz, offer a self-archiving service. Self-archiving guides can also be of help to researchers. Make the repository attractive for researchers Make it possible for personal publication lists to be generated from the repository for reuse in other services. As researchers can use these lists in different contexts (e.g., to raise third-party funding), their willingness to use the repository will increase. Organise information and training events Talks and workshops are important for creating an awareness of open access. So, deliver presentations on your open access services in committees, at institutes, or in colloquiums, as well as at symposia and conferences. Events during Open Access Week can also be useful. Address also the technical aspects of relevance to researchers, for example, the uploading of documents. 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 ) Legal Aspects Legal Questions Find an introduction here. Open Policy Finder An overview of publishers' open access archiving rules can be found here. Offene Lizenzen für offene Wissenschaft Quelle: Brinken, H., Hauss, J. & Rücknagel, J. (2021). Offene Lizenzen für offene Wissenschaft, open-access.network. https://doi.org/10.5446/52864 ( CC BY 3.0 DE ) Documents may be deposited in repositories in a pleasingly large number of cases. Open Policy Finder provides information on the policies of many publishers with regard to the self-archiving of the texts that they publish ( Tobias, 2018; Voigt & Dittmann, 2019 ). Note that when permitting self-archiving, publishers often differentiate between the making available of preprints and post-prints . The publisher’s version may not always be made available online; in many cases, only the author’s accepted version may be used. It must be borne in mind that when documents are unlawfully deposited, liabi­lity mechanisms are brought into play. Thus, the question arises as to who is liable for the making available of the content to the public. It is best to have the authors commission you to deposit the document in question in the repository ( Voigt & Dittmann, 2019 ). This deposit licence should indicate the legislative basis on which the document is held in the repository. An example of such a li­censing agreement can be found on the Osnabrück University Library website . In any case, in order to be able to assess and contractually limit the risk in ad­vance, you should be aware of the legal liability consequences of a potential in­fringement (see also: Country-specific info on liability law in our legal section ). Documents that are released under an open content licence are legally more unambiguously defined than documents where the rights are (possibly) held in part by a publisher. Because open content licences are standardised, the extent to which the document can be made available in your repository is easily under­standable to you. This is particularly true of the Creative Commons licences , which are very widely used in academia. Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) It is advisable to have your repository listed in the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) . In OpenDOAR, aggregators find relevant repositories in a targeted way and analyse the technical information for reuse. Interconnecting with other services It is important that you integrate your repository with other services in order, for example, to successfully embed it into value added services ( Müller & Scholze, 2012; Rodrigues et al., 2017 ). Integration is also of central importance for the findability and visibility of the deposited documents ( Müller & Scholze, 2012 ). How exactly this integration can be implemented is explained in what follows on the basis of initiatives and projects that are committed to it. Search Engines: BASE and Google Bielefeld Academic Search Engine ( BASE ), which is operated by Bielefeld University Library, specialises in academic web resources, inter alia texts in repositories. As it is currently one of the largest specialised search en­gines, it is important that the documents in your repository can be found via BASE. You can check here whether your repository is already indexed as a content provider by BASE. If this is not the case, you can suggest that it be indexed. One essential prerequisite for indexing is that the meta­data of the documents be provided via a valid OAI-PMH interface. Last but not least, your repository should also be optimised for popular search engines, such as Google ( Rajski, 2018 ), so that documents are easily findable. After all, Google Scholar, in particular, is an important starting point when searching for scholarly articles ( Rajski, 2018 ). In this connection, the repository sitemap should be understood as a machine-readable table of contents. It is important that this table of contents con­tain all the links that you wish to be indexed by search engines. It is also important to indicate when the pages were last updated. Moreover, they should be assigned descriptive metadata, which should be concealed together with the link to the full text in the machine-readable < head > section of the HTML page. The more comprehensive these meta tags are, the more reliably the search engine can aggregate different resources. In this way, full texts of up to 5 MB in size can also be discovered and indexed via Google Scholar ( Rajski, 2018 ). DINI Certificate The Deutsche Initiative für Netzwerkinformation (German Initiative for Network Information, DINI) has set itself the goal of improving informa­tion and communication services at academic institutions. This goal is to be realised inter alia by further developing the institutional information infrastructures. In this connection, DINI supports the building of repositories. The aim is to qualitatively improve scholarly communication nationally and inter­nationally by means of publications that are accessible worldwide and stored on a long-term basis. The DINI Certificate for the quality assu­rance of open access repositories and publication services was created within this framework. It pursues three main aims with regard to repositories ( Müller & Scholze, 2012 ): It describes in detail the requirements that repositories are expected to fulfil. Repositories are understood as scholarly publication servi­ces. These services comprise the following components: technology, personnel, organisation, and processes. It demonstrates how repositories can develop themselves further – technically and organisationally. It documents whether standards have been met and recommenda­tions implemented. This documentation is accessible to repository users and managers. Because electronic publishing and the stan­dards associated with it are subject to rapid changes, the certificate is updated regularly. OpenAIRE Compliance and the Visibility of Repositories Documents can be discovered and indexed much more easily when they are deposited in repositories that comply with certain standards. These standards were originally developed in the project OpenAIRE (Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe) , which started in 2009. In this context, metadata elements were defined, with the help of which repositories can tag documents in order to link them with other resources in accordance with the principle of enhanced publication ( Kaiser & McNeill, 2019 ). In this way, for example, documents can be linked with research data or project funding information. Information about researchers can also be embedded. Various software solutions for repositories now provide interfaces to ensure OpenAIRE compliance. If, for example, a local repository does not implement the necessary metadata schemas for DSpace or EPrints in accordance with OpenAIRE standards, the linking of documents with other resources can be carried out manually via the OpenAIRE portal . This portal enables targeted searches for publications, data, projects, or persons. Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) also pursues the objective of making repositories more attractive for researchers. This is to be achieved by enhancing the visibility, dissemination, und usability of scholarly materials in open access repositories by means of organisa­tional and technical agreements ( Rodrigues et al., 2017 ). In contrast to the DINI Certificate, this is taking place on an international level. Of central importance in this regard is the integration of repositories with the existing infrastructure ( Rodrigues et al., 2017 ). Moreover, exchanges among repository managers and the development of content recruit­ment models and strategies are of great importance ( Rodrigues et al., 2017 ). BASE BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) is one of the world's largest search engines for academic web documents. The index includes over 240 million documents from over 8,000 data providers. Practical Tip Find helpful tips and advice on how to operate a repository in the COAR Community Framework for Best Practices in Repositories . References Beringer, C., & Arning, U. (2020). Leitfaden zum Aufbau von Open-Access- Publikationsplattformen für den Goldenen und Grünen Weg. Publisso. ZB MED-Publikationsportal Lebenswissenschaften. https://doi.org/10.4126/FRL01-006419770 Euler, E. (2018). Repositorien und ihre Bedeutung für die Wissenschaftler und Wissenschaftlerinnen. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1204919 European Commission. (2021). Horizon Europe (HORIZON). Euratom Research and Training Programme (EURATOM). General Model Grant Agreement. EIC Accelerator Contract. https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/docs/2021-2027/common/agr-contr/general-mga_horizon-euratom_en.pdf Kaiser, O., & McNeill, G. (2019). OpenAIRE für RepositorymanagerInnen - Wie Repository ManagerInnen Open Science unterstützen können. Mitteilungen der VÖB, 72 (2), 373–382. https://doi.org/10.31263/voebm.v72i2.2815 Macgregor, G. (2020). Enhancing Content Discovery of Open Repositories: An Analytics-Based Evaluation of Repository Optimizations. Publications, 8(1) (8). https://doi.org/10.3390/publications8010008 Müller, U., & Scholze, F. (2012, November 14). Aufbau und Vernetzung eines Repositoriums. das bibliothekswesen. Erfolgreiches Management von Bibliotheken und Informationseinrichtungen. https://www.dasbibliothekswissen.de/Aufbau-und-Vernetzung-eines-Repositoriums.html Rajski, B. (2018). ABI Technikfrage. Wie kommt das Repositorium in die Suchmaschine? ABI Technik, 38 (1), 116. https://doi.org/10.1515/abitech-2018-0017 Rodrigues, E., Bollini, A., Cabezas, A., Castelli, D., Carr, L., Chan, L., Humphrey, C., Johnson, R., Knoth, P., Manghi, P., Matizirofa, L., Perakakis, P., Schirrwagen, J., Selematsela, D., Shearer, K., Walk, P., Wilcox, D., & Yamaji, K. (2017). Next Generation Repositories: Behaviours and Technical Recommendations of the COAR Next Generation Repositories Working Group. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1215013 Tobias, R. (2018). Optimierung der Workflows für Zweitveröffentlichungen – der „Grüne Weg“ am Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT). O| bib. Das offene Bibliotheksjournal, 5 (4), 71–83. https://doi.org/10.5282/o-bib/2018H4S71-83 Voigt, M., & Dittmann, S. (2019). Zweitveröffentlichungsservice der TU Berlin – Automatisierungsmöglichkeiten für den Workflow. LIBREAS. Library Ideas, 35 . https://libreas.eu/ausgabe35/voigt/ Weimar, A. (2020, September 17). Aufbau und Betrieb eines Open-Access-Repositoriums am Beispiel OPUS. Open-Access-Tage 2020. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4032208 Further Reading Arning, U. (2021, März 15). Aufbau einer qualitätsgesicherten Open-Access-Publikationsplattform – die drei wichtigsten Überlegungen aus Sicht einer Publikationsmanagerin. FIS & EPUB. Gemeinsamer Blog der DINI AG Forschungsinformationssystem und Elektronisches Publizieren . https://blogs.tib.eu/wp/dini-ag-blog/2021/03/15/aufbau-oa-publikationsplattform/ Demetres, M. R., Delgado, D., & Wright, D. N. (2020). The Impact of Institutional Repositories: A Systematic Review. Journal of the Medical Library Association, 108 (2), 177–184. https://doi.org/10.5195/jmla.2020.856 . Graf, K. (2017). Wie füllt man die Open-Access-Dokumentenserver? Archivalia. https://archiv.twoday.net/stories/3264283/...

  4. Implementing Open Access

    Intro Open Access in 60 Sekunden Quelle: Brinken, H., Hauss, J. & Rücknagel, J. (2021). Open Access in 60 Sekunden, open-access.network. https://doi.org/10.5446/50831 ( CC BY 3.0 DE ) The key takeaways from this article are 1 The introduction of open access should be strategically and jointly implemented by the management and the library. 2 Institutions that implement open access should clearly demonstrate their commitment to open access with an open access policy. 3 Infrastructure offerings to scholars and scientists for the practical implementation of open access are essential. Implementing Open Access Open access improves access to scholarly information and enhances the visi­bility of scholarly institutions. Although the principles of open access are fully accepted and valued by researchers ( Dallmeier-Tiessen et al., 2011; Ross-Hellauer et al., 2017 ), concrete measures are needed to implement open access in practice. What Political Standpoints are There on Open Access? Find an introduction here. Open Access Policies 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 ) Practical Tip In the practical tip Open Access unterstützen - Praxistipps für Hochschulen (German only) you will find tips on how Open Access can be supported by universities. Role of University Management Support by management is an important prerequisite for the successful intro­duction and implementation of open access at an institution. The adoption of a clear position, for example in the form of an open access policy , underscores the fact that providing open access to research results is valued and supported by the institution. In this way, the sustainable use of available resources, and if necessary their redeployment, can be centrally promoted. In the practical implementation of open access at an institution, it is crucial that management cooperate with the library and the data centre, because, as a rule, it is there that the measures are implemented and the services provided. Role of Libraries Libraries are important players in the area of open access. They are reliable intermediaries in the supply of literature and information, and they handle the acquisition and provision of both print and electronic media. At many institu­tions, together with the data centre, they take on a large part of the practical implementation of open access offerings, for example as operators of theses servers and repositories , by supporting the establishment of open access journals , or by establishing university presses themselves. In most cases, they are also responsible for administering open access publication funds . As a rule, libraries are also the ones that create an awareness about and drive the transition to open access. They are in close contact with the departments and know their interest in and needs for open access offerings. In addition, they are familiar with the range of discipline-specific offerings and requirements in the area of open access. In what follows, we outline concrete measures for the introduction and implementation of open access. Here, intensive cooperation between the institution’s library, researchers, data centre, and management is expedient. The implementation of open access involves not only the provision of a technical infrastructure but also comprehensive, target-group-specific marketing activities relating to open access. Practical Tip In the practical tip Open Access unterstützen - Praxistipps für Hochschulbibliotheken (in German) you will find tips on how Open Access can be supported by universities. The following measures have proved effective in implementing open access: Signing the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities can be signed by research performing and research funding organisations , as well as cultural institutions (e.g., libraries or museums). If interested, institution managers should contact the President of the Max Planck Society . By signing the Declaration, an institution commits to promoting scientific discourse through the consistent use of electronic channels of communication and to making scholarly knowledge accessible to the widest possible public. Adopting an Open Access Policy An institutional commitment, for example in the form of an official policy on open access or open science, is the most sustainable way of imple­menting the open access idea at an institution. In addition to expressing the institution’s commitment to open access/open science, this policy usually calls on the members of the institution to make their publications available in open access. This can be done either by publishing the works open access ( gold open access ) or by self-archiving the publications in an institutional repository. An exemplary structure and core content of a policy document are summarised on our webpage Open Access Policies . ROARMAP lists the open access mandates and policies of universities, research institutions, and research funders throughout the world. Institutions can also create their own systems of incentives for open access. For example, open access can also be included as a criterion for the performance-oriented allocation of funds. Appointing an Open Access Officer Besides drafting an institutional open access policy, the appointment of an open access officer as a central contact person for open access topics is recommended. Open access officers act as intermediaries between the library and the interests of the researchers; they play an advisory role, and are comprehensively informed about trends in scholarly publishing behaviour across disciplinary boundaries. The National Open Access Contact Point, OA2020-DE, has compiled a list of the open access officers at German universities and research institutions . The Train-the-Trainer Workshops offered by the project open-access.network provide information materials and training courses for open access officers. Conducting Information Events An institutional commitment to open access alone is not enough. It is also important to make it clear to all members what this commitment means for them in concrete terms. The topic of open access should therefore also be discussed at the level of departments, institutes, and working groups. When marketing open access, it is thus important that information transfer be broad and take place at all levels. International Open Access Week takes place every year in the third week of October. During Open Access Week, the topic of open access is addressed at many different locations worldwide in order to promote open access to knowledge and information resulting from publicly funded research and to provide information on site. Open Access Week provides institutions with a good opportunity to inform their members about open access. A range of reusable information materials can be found on our Materials page and in the Zenodo Community of the project open-access.network . Information videos about open access can be found in the open-access.network series on the TIB AV Portal . Building and Integrating a Repository When implementing open access, besides strategic and communicative measures, concrete infrastructure services that enable open access docu­ments to be appropriately archived and showcased are also necessary. Theses and document servers, operated as a rule by the institution’s library, are now the norm at most institutions. Institutional repositories offer university members professionally comprehensive publication services. These services range from the publication of dissertations and series, through the self-archiving of articles and monographs, to the archiving of video recordings, posters, and presentation slides. Detailed information on building and operating repositories can be found on our Repositories page. In the focus group Zweitveröffentlichung [Self-Archiving] , providers of self-archiving services have the opportunity to exchange information and experiences on practical and legal issues. Examples of institutional publication services include KOPS , the institu­tional repository at the University of Konstanz; GRO.publications / GRO.­data for text and data publications of the research institutions in Göttingen; and the TIB AV-Portal for scientific videos at the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB). Supporting the Establishment of Scholarly Presses and Journals at the Institution University presses are primarily devoted to the publications of their own institutions. When distributing traditional books, they aim to offer high quality at fair prices. Besides print publications, university presses also publish online editions, thereby supporting the principle of open access. As a rule, responsibility for operating these scholarly presses lies with the university libraries, which thus not only acquire scholarly content but also offer publication opportunities themselves. The majority of German-language university presses have joined together in the Arbeitsgemein­schaft der Universitätsverlage (working group of the German-language university presses), which has produced, among other things, useful information materials and guidelines on various aspects of open access publishing . In addition, institutions can support their researchers in establishing their own open access journals . Many libraries offer advisory services on or provide assistance with matters relating to the concrete implementation of open access journals. Detailed information on establishing and operating open access journals can be found on our Publishing Open Access Journals page. The focus group scholar-led.network offers a forum for independently published journals and editors collectives whose free-of-charge publica­tions are produced independently of major publishers. Setting Up an Open Access Publication Fund Dealing with open access publication charges is crucial for the further strategic and organisational development of the scholarly information supply. A dedicated budget for publication charges, as well as funda­mental decisions concerning the handling of open access publication charges, are expedient and can be an effective instrument for reorgani­sing economic relationships between the scholarly institution and publishers. Many institutions provide an institutional open access publication fund for this purpose; it is often administered by the institution’s library. From this fund, the institution pays the open access article processing charges (APCs) or book processing charges (BPCs) incurred by its researchers. Libraries lend themselves to the role of publication fund administrator because they have years of experience in working with publishers, and thus have the necessary contacts. The specific challenges involved in setting up and operating open access monograph funds are addressed by the focus group Open-Access-Monographiefonds [Open Access Monograph Funds] . Anchoring Open Access in the Entire Institution To implement open access in a sustainable and comprehensive way, it is important to raise open access awareness beyond the levels of the management and the library. Researchers, doctoral candidates, students, and research support staff should therefore be included in PR and marketing measures. This applies especially to those areas of the administration that deal with the requirements of research funding agencies and the measurement of scholarly output. In addition, the open access idea can be spread sustainably if it is suggested to young scholars and scientists at an early stage, for example at study seminars or in graduate programmes. References Dallmeier-Tiessen, S., Darby, R., Goerner, B., Hyppoelae, J., Igo-Kemenes, P., Kahn, D., Lambert, S., Lengenfelder, A., Leonard, C., Mele, S., Nowicka, M., Polydoratou, P., Ross, D., Ruiz-Perez, S., Schimmer, R., Swaisland, M., & van der Stelt, W. (2011). Highlights from the SOAP project survey. What Scientists Think about Open Access Publishing . ArXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/1101.5260 Ross-Hellauer, T., Deppe, A., & Schmidt, B. (2017). Survey on open peer review: Attitudes and experience amongst editors, authors and reviewers. PLOS ONE, 12 (12). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0189311 Further Reading Canadian Association of Research Libraries. (2020). CARL Institutional Open Access Policy Template and Toolkit . Version 1.0. https://www.carl-abrc.ca/oa-policy-template-and-toolkit/ European Commission. (2012). Online survey on scientific information in the digital age . http://dx.doi.org/10.2777/36123 Fournier, J., Klages, T., & Pampel, H. (2012). Open-Access-Strategien für wissenschaftliche Einrichtungen: Bausteine und Beispiele . Arbeitsgruppe Open Access der Schwerpunktinitiative Digitale Information der Allianz der deutschen Wissenschaftsorganisationen. https://doi.org/10.2312/allianzoa.005 Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP). (2021). Good practices for university open-access policies . Cyber.Harvard.edu. https://cyber.harvard.edu/hoap/Good_practices_for_university_open-access_policies Jacobs, N. (2019). Implementing open access. Practical steps your institution can take to make progress on the open access journey . Jisc. https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/implementing-open-access Jisc. (2019, October 21). Managing your open access costs . Jisc. https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/managing-your-open-access-costs Pieper, D. (2020). Kostenmonitoring von Open-Access-Publikationen: Chancen und Herausforderung für Bibliotheken . Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4118210 Rösch, H., Geschuhn, K., Barbers, I., Bove, K., Pohlmann, T., & Satzinger, L. (2022). Open Access ermöglichen: Open Access-Transformation und Erwerbung in wissenschaftlichen Bibliotheken – ein praktischer Leitfaden . https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6090208 Wissenschaftsrat (2022). Empfehlungen zur Transformation des Wissenschaftlichen Publizierens zu Open Access; Köln. https://doi.org/10.57674/fyrc-vb61 ....

  5. Implementing Open Access

    Here you find out how to put open access into practice Starting and Publishing an Open Access Journal How do I operate a repository Implementing Open Access Converting Journals to Open Access...

  6. Materials Science

    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 Materials Science Materials science focuses on the research, development, and application of materials. As an interdisciplinary research field located at the intersection of basic sciences (primarily chemistry and physics) and engineering methods, it aims to find new materials or improve and optimise existing ones for specific areas of application. The open access landscape in this field is correspondingly varied and reflects both the progress achieved and the challenges faced by the respective constituent disciplines. Materials science benefits from the different open access traditions in these disciplines. Materials science subfields that are branches of physics (e.g. solid-state physics) have long been using established open access structures – especially the preprint repository arXiv . However, subfields that are branches of chemistry or engineering are still reticent to adopt open access publishing models. One core characteristic of materials science is its close link to industrial application. As in the case of engineering, this closeness to industry leads to particular reservations regarding open access. To avoid endangering patent rights and licensing opportunities, materials science researchers are often reticent to publish research results that can be directly commercially exploited. The transformative agreements concluded by DEAL with major scholarly publishers such as Wiley, Springer Nature, and Elsevier also have positive effects for materials science, as these publishers have many materials science journals in their portfolios. Open Access Journals As of November 2025, the community-curated online Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listed 138 entries under “ Materials of Engineering and Construction. Mechanics of Materials” . The Electronic Journals Library’s (EZB) traffic lights system indicates the accessibility of journals in the subject area “Materials Science and Manufacturing Engineering” . Important and renowned open access materials science journals include: Material Design & Processing Communications Materials Letters: X Science and Technology of Advanced Materials (STAM) und STAM: methods npj Materials Sustainability , npj Computational Materials , npj Quantum Materials , and npj 2D Materials and Applications Other important open access journals in this field include: APL Materials Materials Research Letters InfoMat Oxford Open Materials Science Advanced Powder Materials One example of a diamond open access journal of materials science is: Communications in Development and Assembling of Textile Products Although the journals listed above are just a small selection of open access materials science journals, they include journals published by relevant publishers or with a long open access tradition. The Journal Recommender helps researchers to find suitable open access journals for their publications. This tool is based on B!SON , a recommender service for open access journals. What are Open Access Journals? Find an introduction here. Practical Tip Publishing Open Access: How to evaluate a journal's quality Video on the Funding of Open Access Articles Source: Becklas Dorow, C., Hauss, J. (2026). Funding Open Access Articles – What Are the Options?. Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB), open-access.network. https://doi.org/10.5446/73596 ( CC BY 3.0 DE ) open-access.network (2026) ( CC BY 4.0 International ) What are Open Access Books? Find an introduction here. open-access.network (2026) ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Open Access Books In addition to open access journals of materials science, there are also a wide range of open access books in this field. As of November 2025, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) listed 341 titles under " Materials Science " and the online library and publication platform OAPEN listed 101 titles under " Materials Science ". Disciplinary Repositories Various established preprint repositories cater for disciplines represented in materials science. They include: engrXiv – Established in 2016, engrXiv is a repository for engineering preprints and post-prints . arXiv – Established in 1991, arXiv is very strong in the areas of physics, mathematics, chemical physics, and related disciplines. ChemRxiv – Launched in 2017, ChemRxiv is an archive service for preprints in chemistry and related areas. bioRxiv – Founded in 2023, bioRxiv is a server for preprints in the life sciences. In addition to these text repositories, there are also several data repositories for the publication and archiving of research data ( see below ). What are Repositories? Find an introduction here. Legal Aspects Find an introduction here. Video about Self-Archiving Rights Source: 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 Science in Materials Science The Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur (National Research Data Infrastructure; NFDI) bundles initiatives dedicated to the systematic collection, long-term preservation and storage, and provision of research data in Germany. For materials science and materials engineering, three consortia are of particular relevance: NFDI-MatWerk – A NFDI for materials science and materials engineering FAIRmat – A FAIR (i.e., findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) data infrastructure for condensed-matter physics and the chemical physics of solids NFDI4Ing – A NFDI for the engineering sciences Together, they contribute to making data (re)usable in a sustainable way and to networking materials science research. These consortia engage in exchanges with the Specialised Information Service (FID) Materials Science and Engineering – FID Materials Science for short – which provides various tools and services for researchers in materials science and materials engineering. The aim of the FID Materials Science project is to provide rapid and effective information and networking for the scientific community: Material Hub brings together information on materials from research and industry, thus enabling intuitive and efficient searches. Data providers benefit from the possibility of publicising their research results and materials. The Materials Guide can be used to find materials science databases. Search results can be filtered by material class and accessibility. Drawing on publicly accessible information, the Materials Map provides an overview of the materials science and materials engineering research communities, their actors, and these actors’ areas of expertise and publications. Data Repositories There are several data repositories of relevance to materials science: NOMAD (management and sharing of materials science data) The repository enables researchers to share simulations of electronic structures by uploading and publishing input and output files. Since October 2021, the main software developments for the NOMAD Lab take place at the NOMAD Data Center at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (NOMAD HUB), which was established to host FAIRmat , the NFDI consortium for condensed-matter physics and the chemical physics of solids. Further services: encyclopaedia, AI toolkit, and archive Kadi4Mat This virtual research environment with a focus on materials science enables the combined use of a repository component (management and sharing of data) and an electronic lab notebook (ELN) component (analysis, visualisation, and conversion of data) Materials Cloud ( EPFL , Switzerland) This platform for computational materials science is closely linked to the Automated Interactive Infrastructure and Database for Computational Science ( AiiDA ; enables the automation of simulations) and provides a data archive, various tools, and visualisations. Materials Project (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, USA) Further (international) repositories can be found at the Registry of Research Data Repositories, re3data.org , which as of November 2025 listed 59 entries under Materials Science . Other In addition, materials science and manufacturing engineering databases can be found via the Database Information System ( DBIS ), which lists both freely available and licensed databases. Open Educational Resources (OER) are educational materials of all kinds that can be accessed and used free of charge. As of November 2025, the portal for higher education teaching twillo listed 140 entries under " Materials Science and Materials Engineering ". The Open Educational Resources Search Index ( OERSI ) also listed 140 results for " Materials Science and Materials Engineering " as of November 2025. Further Reading Choudhary, K., Garrity, K. F., Reid, A. C. E., DeCost, B., Biacchi, A. J., Hight Walker, A. R., Trautt, Z., Hattrick-Simpers, J., Kusne, A. G., Centrone, A., Davydov, A., Jiang, J., Pachter, R., Cheon, G., Reed, E., Agrawal, A., Qian, X., Sharma, V., Zhuang, H., … Tavazza, F. (2020). The joint automated repository for various integrated simulations (JARVIS) for data-driven materials design. npj Computational Materials , 6 (1), 173. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41524-020-00440-1 Draxl, C., Scheffler, M. (2019). The NOMAD laboratory: from From data sharing to artificial intelligence. Journal of Physics: Materials, 2 (3), 036001. https://doi.org/10.1088/2515-7639/ab13bb 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 Horton, M. K., Huck, P., Yang, R. X., Munro, J. M., Dwaraknath, S., Ganose, A. M., Kingsbury, R. S., Wen, M., Shen, J. X., Mathis, T. S., Kaplan, A. D., Berket, K., Riebesell, J., George, J., Rosen, A. S., Spotte-Smith, E. W. C., McDermott, M. J., Cohen, O. A., Dunn, A., … Persson, K. A. (2025). Accelerated data-driven materials science with the Materials Project. Nature Materials , 24 (10), 1522–1532. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-025-02272-0 Piwowar H, Priem J, Larivière V, Alperin JP, Matthias L, Norlander B, Farley A, West J, Haustein S. (2018). The state of OA: a A large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles. PeerJ, 6 , e4375 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4375 Talirz, L., Kumbhar, S., Passaro, E., Yakutovich, A. V., Granata, V., Gargiulo, F., Borelli, M., Uhrin, M., Huber, S. P., Zoupanos, S., Adorf, C. S., Andersen, C. W., Schütt, O., Pignedoli, C. A., Passerone, D., VandeVondele, J., Schulthess, T. C., Smit, B., Pizzi, G., & Marzari, N. (2020). Materials Cloud, a platform for open computational science. Scientific Data , 7 (1), 299. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-020-00637-5 Content editor of this web page: the Specialised Information Service Materials Science and Engineering (FID Materials Science) team (Last updated: May 2026)....

  7. OA and Reuse

    Intro What Does Open Access mean? "By open access to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet , permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited." Budapest Open Access Initiative Declaration, 2002 ; emphasis added The key takeaways from this article are 1 Open access comprises two component parts: access that is free of charge, and reuse that is free of at least some copyright and licensing restrictions. 2 The reuse of scientific information makes the research cycle more efficient. 3 Third parties’ rights of use in open access publications are set out in usage licences. Libre or Just Gratis? According to the definition used in the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) , open access means not only that scientific and scholarly information is available free of charge, but also – and just as importantly – that this information can be reused freely, that is, without at least some copyright and licensing restrictions: Open Access publications can be categorized as Gratis Open Access and Libre Open Access . The difference lies in how the publications can be used by end users. Gratis open access means that a publication can be viewed and printed free of charge (Suber, 2008) . Libre open access refers to broader use permitted through open licences such as those provided by Creative Commons (Suber, 2008) . According to the BOAI definition, the only true version of open access is libre open access. In other words, reusability is a necessary component. Source: based on Suber, P. (2008). Gratis and libre open access. https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/4322580 ( CC BY-SA 4.0 ). Advantages of reuse The global digital networking of science offers the potential of better access to and better reusability of scientific findings. This enables new approaches to scientific questions and promotes scientific collaboration. Moreover, information can be shared more quickly, research cycles shortened and scientific progress accelerated. The linking and reuse of published research data also plays a role here (Pampel, 2010) . Practical tip Numerous search engines specialize in OA specialist publications and provide worldwide free access to full texts. Click here for the practical tip finding open access literature in German . Examples Via arXiv , which is used intensively in physics and mathematics , and other repositories , researchers make their findings available to the public as pre­prints prior to peer review and publication, thereby enabling their speedy dissemination and reuse. Alma Swan (2010) attributed the high citation counts of open access documents to – among other things – their faster and global availability. She called this phenomenon an early advantage . The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) operates according to the principle that the rights of users and the copyright terms must be clearly specified through licensing so that open access can function effectively. For that reason, DOAJ accepts only libre open access journals . Clarity through Licences Usage licences are granted in order to make it clear how research results may be reused. It is up to the authors to decide what degree of freedom of use of their works they wish to allow. The right of quotation pursuant to Section 51 of the German Copyright Act (UrhG) allows authors to incorporate quotations from works or parts of works of third parties into their own works without authorisa­tion. However, the latter works must be independent of the quoted works. When quoting from works of third parties, the original text must be quoted; it may not be adapted or otherwise transformed (Dreier, in Dreier & Schulze, 2018, § 51 UrhG, Rn. 7.) . In order to clearly indicate that the open access publi­cation may not only be read and quoted but also reused and changed, it is essential that a usage licence be granted by the author. An overview of different license models is provided on the page Licenses . Granting specific rights of use on the basis of such licenses gives users explicit information on how the document may be further used and simplifies legal enforcement in the event of misuse. At the same time, the author reserves the right to permit further uses in separate agreements. The Bertelsmann Stiftung's guide to the use of free licenses explains this step by step (Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2016) . The open licences from Creative Commons (CC licences) are the most commonly used licences in the area of science and research. According to the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humani­ties , in particular the adaptation and use of works for any responsible purpose (and thus in principle also for commercial purposes) should be permissible. Thus, from the perspective of the Berlin Declaration, only the CC-BY und CC-BY-SA licences are "genuine" open access licences. Especially the NC (NonCommer­cial) component is frequently controversial because it is often unclear what cases constitute commercial use. For example, publications whose licences include an "NC" component may not be used on commercial platforms such as most social media services. Nor may they be used by private or non-profit education providers and associations that charge fees for certain services to cover costs. Therefore, many agencies advise against using the NC component. For answers to the most frequently asked questions about Creative Commons licences, see the list of FAQs on the CC website . Authors are recommended to allow the free worldwide right of access to and reuse of their publications by granting open licences – if applicable, in consultation with the respective publishers or in accordance with the licensing requirements of the respective repositories. Source: Shaddim (2016). Creative commons license spectrum ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Wie genau funktionieren Creative-Commons-Lizenzen? Quelle: Brinken, H., Hauss, J. & Rücknagel, J. (2021). Wie genau funktionieren Creative-Commons-Lizenzen? open-access.network. https://doi.org/10.5446/52952 ( CC BY 3.0 DE ) References Bertelsmann Stiftung. (2016). Freie Lizenzen – einfach erklärt. Ein Leitfaden für die Anwendung freier Lizenzen in der Bertelsmann Stiftung. https://www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de/de/publikationen/publikation/did/freie-lizenzen-einfach-erklaert Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002). https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/translations/german-translation Charbonnier, J., Sohmen, L., Rothman, J., Rohden, B., & Wartena, C. (2018). NOA: A Search Engine for Reusable Scientific Images Beyond the Life Sciences. ECIR 2018: Advances in Information Retrieval , 797–800. https://doi.org/10.25968/opus-1208 Dreier, T. & Schulze, G. (2018). UrhG. Urheberrechtsgesetz (6. Auflage). C.H. Beck. Pampel, H. (2010). Open Access – Von der Zugänglichkeit zur Nachnutzung. https://gfzpublic.gfz-potsdam.de/rest/items/item_244054_1/component/file_244053/content Suber, P. (2008). Gratis and libre open access. https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/4322580 Swan, A. (2010). The open access citation advantage: Studies and results to date. https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/268516/ Furher Reading Owen, Victoria and Reilly, Susan (2022). Navigating Copyright for Libraries: Purpose and Scope , Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110732009...

  8. Open Access Arguments and Reservations

    Intro The advantages of open access Source: Strauß, H. & Becklas Dorow, C. (2026). 10 reasons for open access, open-access.network. https://doi.org/10.5446/72493 ( CC BY 4.0 ) The key takeaways from this article are 1 There are numerous arguments in favour of open access. 2 However, there are also doubts and reservations. 3 Many reservations can be dispelled with good counter-arguments. Arguments for Open Access Faster and Cost-Free Access to Scholarly Information Information published open access is immediately accessible to, and easily findable online by, all researchers, students, and professionals, and by the interested public worldwide. Open access contributions are often published more quickly than in the conventional publishing system. Open access works are available to everyone, irrespective of financial resources and research location, because, unlike closed access works, they may be used free of charge. Therefore, open access can contribute to reducing the digital divide in research. Fair Use of Taxpayers’ Money, Research Funders’ Guidelines Many research funding organisations have incorporated open access provisions into their funding guidelines. The grant agreements stipulate that scientific publications that result from funded projects must be made available to the public in open access and must be reusable . In this way, it is ensured that results from research projects that are publicly funded with taxpayers’ money can also be used by the public. Open Access to Results of Publicly Funded Research Through open access , the results of publicly funded research are freely available online and reusable . Hence, research performing organisations do not have to buy them (back) from publishers. Greater Visibility and Citation Frequency of Publications Open access contributions have much greater visibility than contribu­tions that are not freely available online. Their cost-free availability worldwide leads to increased use, which in turn leads to higher citation frequency. A number of empirical studies have shown that open access publications enjoy a sometimes considerable citation advantage com­pared with closed access publications ( Piwowar et al., 2018; Langham-Putrow et al., 2021 ). Other, older studies on the open access citation advantage can be found in an overview provided by SPARC Europe. The main advantages of open access are often described with the terms visibility and impact . Visibility refers to the probability that a publication will be noticed and disseminated; impact refers to the long-term reception of the publication and the incorporation of the results into further research work and scholarly debate. Together, visibility and impact contribute to the reputation of authors and their institutions. Promotion of International and Inter-Disciplinary Cooperation Open access publications promote the global networking of research activities. Moreover, the free availability and reusability of open access content worldwide enables people in poorer countries to access and use relevant scientific information. Open access publishers that are funded through publication fees often waive these charges in the case of researchers from poorer countries. The timely international publication of research findings promotes cooperation among researchers and accelerates the research process. Moreover, authors of open access publications receive immediate feedback from their peers worldwide. Authors Retain the Right to Exploit their Works Open access publications enjoy the same copyright protections as other publications. In publishing agreements, authors grant the publishers only a non-exclusive right of use. Thus, they retain the right to exploit their works themselves. Moreover, open licences such as Creative Commons licences enable authors to specify further rights of use themselves, to share their content under internationally standardised terms and conditions, and to keep further publication options open. Compared with transferring all exploi­tation rights to the publisher, which is the norm in conventional publi­shing agreements, open access thus has clear advantages for authors. Long-Term Availability of the Documents When documents are self-archived in repositories , their long-term preservation is assured. This is not the case when they are made available on the author’s personal website. Long-term access to the text is guaranteed technically by assigning a persistent identifier (e.g. DOI, URN) that is independent of the concrete storage location of the document. As yet, many scholarly authors do not archive their works reliably and on a long-term basis. As a consequence, the results are lost to their research institutions, and responsibility for their long-term preservation lies solely with the publishers. However, parallel storage in open access repositories helps to ensure long-term accessibility. Because of the usage licences under which they are made available, genuinely open access publications can also be archived by third parties without separate permission. This is a further safeguard against loss. Promotion of Research Efficiency Repositories such as arXiv make research findings available as preprints before peer review and formal publication. In this way, research results enter into circulation more quickly and can be discussed and assessed. Swan (2010) attributed the high citation figures of open access publications to, among other things, their rapid availability. She termed this phenomenon the early advantage . Improvement of the Information Supply and a Way Out of the Serials Crisis Open access supports the information supply technically because the possibility of direct online access means that procurement effort and time losses are avoided. On the other hand, in view of the growing share of freely accessible publications, it is becoming increasingly easier to quickly obtain comprehensive information on the current state of research. Since the mid-1990s, rising costs of subscriptions to closed access journals have placed a burden on library budgets. This has led to an undersupply of scholarly journals – the so-called serials crisis . As a result, many journals are no longer available from libraries. Because open access aims to make scholarly knowledge freely available and reusable worldwide, such supply gaps do not occur in the case of open access publications. Advantages in Networked, IT-Supported Work Environments Because of their restricted accessibility and reusability, closed access publications are not well suited to the demands of digital science, which relies on networking, the enrichment of information, automated analy­ses, and text and data mining. By contrast, open access enables barrier-free access to information within networked research environments and workflows, and it is therefore an important infrastructural prerequisite for digital science. Establishing Priority When authors publish a work, they announce a research result, identify themselves with it, and vouch for the content and the scholarly quality of the publication. The publication date is of essential importance in terms of documenting scientific priority, for example in the case of a discovery or an invention ( Werner, 2010 ). Preprints, in particular, offer various advantages when it comes to establishing priority. Authors can save time by making a preprint version of the work available in an open access repository. In this way, they avoid priority problems in the event of the rejection of the manuscript by a journal and the further delay that this causes. Good Findability via Search Engines and Indexing Services Because open access publications are available without access restric­tions, the full texts are also findable via search engines such as Google or Google Scholar. As a rule, they are indexed by means of metadata, abstracts, and keywords, which is why they are findable via international search engines and library catalogues immediately after publication. Thus, optimal visibility and scientific impact can be achieved. Moreover, the relevance of these publications for specific research questions can be directly examined. This also contributes to transparency in science and scholarship. Source: based on Brinken, H. (2021). 10 Gründe für Open Access. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4643859 ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Dispelling Reservations Quality Concerns Reservation: Lack of Reputation Some authors fear that open access contributions will not receive proper recognition, which could negatively impact performance evaluation and applications for funding and could therefore be detrimental to their academic careers ( Olejniczak & Wilson, 2020 ). One possible reason given for this is that open access journals are not well established and that they lack reputation. Counter-Arguments This fear, which was articulated especially in the early days of open access publishing , is visibly waning because the reputation of scholarly journals generally increases over time. By now, the once new open access journals have published several volumes and are well established. In 2012, PLOS ONE became the first open access journal to receive the highest share of all citations (1.3% based on Web of Science data); it replaced the closed access journal Procee­dings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) at the top of the table ( Geschuhn et al., 2013 ). Moreover, quality concerns relate only to one of the two open access strategies – gold open access . In the case of green open access , the work in question has usually been published in a closed access journal and is then self-archived in a freely accessible repository. Hence, concerns on the part of the author that their reputation will suffer as a result of publishing open access are unfounded in this case. Because these reservations do not relate to open access per se, but rather to the status of relatively new journals, they are also unfounded when established closed access journals are converted to open access. Reservation: Lack of Quality Assurance Although only about a quarter of open access journals are (partially) funded through article processing charges , it is sometimes alleged that these charges corrupt quality assurance. It is argued that because journals that use this model earn money from every published article, quality assurance through rigorous peer review is less important to them than revenue from article processing charges ( Conticello, 2021 ). Open-Access-Mythencheck: "Open Access hat nicht die gleiche Qualität" Quelle: Strauß, H.; Hauss, J.; Rücknagel, J. (2023): Open-Access-Mythencheck: "Open Access hat nicht die gleiche Qualität". Open-Access-Mythencheck, Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) et al., 2023. https://doi.org/10.5446/62322 ( CC BY 3.0 DE ) The fact is ignored that closed access journals also use article processing charges and are therefore also subject to the same mechanisms. Moreover, studies have regularly revealed questionable quality assurance at highly renowned closed access journals. Generally speaking, there is no connection between the reputation of a journal and the underlying business model. Thus, high and low quality can be found equally among commercial and non-commercial publishers and journals, and among fee-based and cost-free offerings. Furthermore, like the editors of any other journals, the editors of open access journals are interested in high-quality contributions because high quality naturally attracts a broader range of authors and low quality is a competitive disadvantage. Hence, numerous open access journals have within a short period of time achieved Journal Impact Factors comparable to those of closed access journals ( Björk & Solomon, 2012 ). The open access movement has even contributed to the testing and establishment of new quality assurance procedures for scholarly publications, for example open peer review and altmetrics . Reservation: Repositories Do Not Have Quality Standards There are also concerns regarding the quality of the documents deposited in disciplinary and institutional repositories. The versions of articles made available in institutional and disciplinary reposi­tories are often limited to post-prints . In other words, self-archiving (green open access) constitutes additional access to a conventional publication, where the original version has already successfully undergone peer review and has been accepted for publication by a journal or a publisher, and thus the quality of the contribution can be considered assured. Occasionally, uncertainties may also arise regarding the authenticity of documents made available in reposito­ries – for example, uncertainty as to whether a document actually has already been formally published with a publisher, or as to how it should be cited. The latter question is easily answered: When citing the work, the bibliographic details of the publisher’s version are used and are supplemented with a link to the open access version. The quality of preprints and working papers is subject to discussion within the discipline and to self-regulation mechanisms in the scientific community. Final theses, for example post-doctoral and doctoral dissertations, usually meet high quality standards. Findability Issues Reservation: Inferior Findability of Open Access Publications Authors of open access content want to be sure that their works are findable and readable, and that they will remain substantively unchanged in the long term. Counter-Arguments Repository operators and the editors of open access journals take account of these requirements. To ensure findability, the documents themselves are not only stored securely and in the long term, they are also linked to searchable metadata. In repositories, the request and retrieval of metadata is ensured via an OAI-PMH interface. As a rule, both open access journals and open access repositories make standardised metadata available, so that the findability of open access publications is at least as good as that of closed access publications. Moreover, open access publications can be self-archived in different locations. This means that open access publications are found, for example, via search engines such as Google or Google Scholar. Moreover, there is also a search engine especially for open access publications, namely, the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) , which also harvests texts from repositories. Long-Term Preservation of Documents Reservation: Open Access Publications Are Not Available in the Long Term It frequently happens that documents that are found on the Internet are no longer findable after a few weeks, months, or years. This common experience gives rise to concern about the long-term availability of the content. Counter-Arguments Closed access and open access documents are equally affected by the problem of digital volatility. To ensure the long-term availability of the documents, it is expedient for publishers, journals, or repositories to cooperate with national libraries or other providers of long-term preservation services. With regard to long-term preservation in the context of providing open access to publications that have been formally published with a publisher (green open access), it is preferable to self-archive the works in a repository rather than depositing them on a website. Compared with using a repository, making works available to the public on web­sites is not secure in the long term. If the author changes organisation, or if changes are made to the website, this usually leads to the loss of the informa­tion in the short or medium term. By contrast, repositories ensure long-term preservation of their documents, inter alia through the long-term affiliation of the repository with a research providing organisation, the assignment of persistent identifiers such as DOIs , or the conversion of documents to a format suitable for long-term preservation. The DINI Certificate for repositories also includes requirements for the long-term availability of documents. Legal Reservations Reservation: Exploitation Rights Are Difficult to Handle Some authors foresee difficulties in handling their exploitation rights when self-archiving their works in repositories. This concern relates to potentially competing exploitation rights in cases where a contribution has already been published in a journal, or where publication is intended at a later date. Moreover, authors want to retain control over the later reuse of their work by others. Counter-Arguments These and similar reservations can usually be dispelled. Information and recommendations in this regard can be found under Legal Questions . Financial Viability of the Author-Pays Model Reservation: Open Access Is More Expensive A frequently discussed criticism of gold open access is the cost. Is the author-pays model actually financially viable ( Chiodelli, 2021 )? This also raises the question of the costs that open access offerings actually involve, and how these costs compare with the costs of individual publications in the traditional publishing system. Open Access Mythos: "Open Access ist viel zu teuer" Quelle: Strauß, H.; Hauss, J.; Rücknagel, J. (2023): Open-Access-Mythencheck: "Open Access ist viel zu teuer". Open-Access-Mythencheck, Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) et al., 2023. https://doi.org/10.5446/62322 ( CC BY 3.0 DE ) Counter-Arguments It is not possible to give an unequivocal answer here. The costs of organising peer review are probably comparable in both cases ( Grossmann & Brembs, 2021 ). However, compared with the traditional publishing system, the concrete cost structures of open access publishers are very different and very difficult to compare. Taking all economic factors into account, Houghton (2009) concluded that open access was most strongly associated with economic benefits and was therefore the most cost-effective mechanism for scholarly publishing – irrespective of whether it was gold or green. Moreover, various studies have shown that, in overall economic terms, open access can lead indirectly to savings in access costs, labour costs, and transaction costs ( Fell, 2019 ). It should be noted that many open access journals do not levy article processing charges ( platinum open access ). Moreover, these charges are often paid from institutional funds or by research funding organisations, or they are part of efforts to return control of the publication process to the scientific community ( Fair Open Access ). There is no doubt that the cost burden at individual universities and non-university research providing organisations is changing. When the financial burden is shifted from users to authors, research-intensive institutions with a high publication output have to pay more, relatively speaking, than universities and non-university research organisations whose members publish less ( Swan & Houghton, 2012 ). Reservation: Article Processing Charges Are Too High Not all researchers find it easy to pay article processing charges from their research funds or other sources. This touches on social, research, and university policy issues ( Olejniczak & Wilson, 2020 ): On the one hand, there are authors who are not affiliated with a scientific institution, and on the other hand, there are authors who belong to an institution that subsidises article processing charges. Humanities and social science disciplines are usually less well funded than the STM disciplines and cannot rely on cross-subsidisation. Authors from developing countries cannot usually afford to pay the article processing charges. Solutions for these problems are sometimes found when universities, for example with support from the German Research Foundation (DFG) and its programme Open Access Publication Funding , establish publication funds from which open access publication charges incurred by their members can be paid. Agreements concluded by consortia of institutions with open access publishers to obtain discounts for authors are one way of reducing publication charges. Crowdfunding models whereby institutions or their libraries come together to jointly finance publications have also become established (see Business Models for Journals ). An overview of alternative open access models is provided by Oberländer and Dreher (2019) . Most open access publishers and journals now grant authors from developing countries special conditions and fee waivers (Lawson, 2015) . Time Expended by Researchers Reservation: Open access is time-consuming Researchers want to spend as little time as possible on self-archiving their works. In this connection, there are reservations with regard to the time that self-archiving takes. Open Access Mythos: "Open Access ist zeitaufwändig" Quelle: Strauß, H.; Hauss, J.; Rücknagel, J. (2023): Open-Access-Mythencheck: "Open Access ist zeitaufwändig". Open-Access-Mythencheck, Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) et al., 2023. https://doi.org/10.5446/62325 ( CC BY 3.0 DE ) Counter-Arguments Anyone who, besides practically carrying out self-archiving, also engages with the technology of good archiving, will generally invest more time at first. Professionally maintained disciplinary and institutional repositories offer ways of getting around this. Libraries are increasingly responding to the justified concerns about the time that self-archiving takes by offering university members the option of delegating the task to the university repositories. References Björk, B.-C., & Solomon, D. (2012). Open access versus subscription journals: a comparison of scientific impact. BMC Medicine , 10. https://doi.org/10.1186/1741-7015-10-73 Chiodelli, F. (2021, January 27). Why we should stop publishing in open-access journals with article processing charges. AESOP Young Academics . https://aesop-youngacademics.net/blog/why-we-should-stop-publishing-in-open-access-journals-with-article-processing-charges Conticello, S. (2021). Open access pay-for-review option — ethical question. Nature , 590(36). https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-00271-0 Fell, M. J. (2019). The economic impacts of open science: A rapid evidence assessment. Publications , 7(3). https://doi.org/10.3390/publications7030046 Geschuhn, K., Palzenberger, M., & Schimmer, R. (2013). Open Access in Zahlen: Der Umbruch in der Wissenschaftskommunikation als Herausforderung für Bibliotheken. Zfbb - Zeitschrift für Bibliothekswesen und Bibliographie , 60(5), 244–250. https://doi.org/10.3196/186429501360532 Grossmann, A., & Brembs, B. (2021). Current market rates for scholarly publishing services. F1000Research , 10(20). https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.27468.2 Houghton, J. (2009). Open access - what are the economic benefits? SSRN . https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1492578 Langham-Putrow, A., Bakker, C., & Riegelman, A. (2021). Is the open access citation advantage real? A systematic review of the citation of open access and subscription-based articles. PLOS ONE , 16(9). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0253129 Lawson, S. (2015). Fee waivers for open access journals. Publications , 3(3), 155–167. https://doi.org/10.3390/publications3030155 Oberländer, A., & Dreher, L. (2019, September 30). Jenseits von APC: Überblick über alternative Open-Access-Modelle . Open-Access-Tage 2019, Hannover. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3490737 Olejniczak, A. J., & Wilson, M. J. (2020). Who’s writing open access (OA) articles? Characteristics of OA authors at Ph.D.-granting institutions in the United States. Quantitative Science Studies , 1(4), 1429–1450. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00091 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 Swan, A. (2010). The Open Access citation advantage: Studies and results to date. https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/268516/ Swan, A., & Houghton, J. (2012). Going for Gold? The costs and benefits of Gold Open Access for UK research institutions: further economic modelling. Report to the UK Open Access Implementation Group. https://repository.jisc.ac.uk/610/2/Modelling_Gold_Open_Access_for_institutions_-_final_draft3.pdf Werner, P. (2010). Berichtswelten. Zum Streit um Patente und Prioritäten in der Vitaminforschung. In K. Fuchs-Kittowski, H. Laitko, H. Parthey, & W. Umstätter (Eds.), Wissenschaft und digitale Bibliothek. Vol. 2. (pp. 195–205). http://www.wissenschaftsforschung.de/Jahrbuch1998.pdf#page=195 Further Reading Bautista-Puig, N., Lopez-Illescas, C., de Moya-Anegon, F., Guerrero-Bote, V., & Moed, H. F. (2020). Do Journals Flipping to Gold Open Access Show an OA Citation or Publication Advantage? Scientometrics, 124(3), 2551–2575. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03546-x . Dehdarirad, T., & Karlsson, K. (2021). News Media Attention in Climate Action: Latent Topics and Open Access. Scientometrics, 126 (9), 8109–8128. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04095-7 . Eger, T., Mertens, A., & Scheufen, M. (2021). Publication Cultures and the Citation Impact of Open Access. Managerial and Decision Economics, 42 (8), 1980-1998. https://doi.org/10.1002/mde.3429 . Hopf, D., Dellmann, S., Hauschke, C., & Tullney, M. (2022). Wirkungen von Open Access. Literaturstudie über empirische Arbeiten 2010-2021 . Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB). https://doi.org/10.34657/7666 Kuchma, I. (2021). Open Science Myths and Misconceptions . TWAS UNESCO webinar. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4883635 Schultz, T. (2021). All the research that’s fit to print: Open access and the news media. Quantitative Science Studies , 2 (3), 828–844. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00139...

  9. Open Access Books

    Intro Open Access in 60 Sekunden Quelle: Brinken, H., Hauss, J. & Rücknagel, J. (2021). Open Access in 60 Sekunden, open-access.network. https://doi.org/10.5446/50831 ( CC BY 3.0 DE ) The key takeaways from this article are 1 Open access has developed into a highly dynamic field in the area of book publications in recent years. 2 As the publication landscape in the area of scholarly books is very heterogeneous, the established open access models for journals cannot simply be transferred. 3 An efficient infrastructure with various publication and funding options has now also developed in the area of open access books. A Dynamic Field Open access for books – this long-neglected topic has gained enormously in importance in recent years. Until well into the 2010s, the open access activities of research funders , libraries and authors focused mainly on the area of scholarly journals. However, the stakeholders in the scholarly publishing system have now also recognised the enormous potential of open access for books, and have initiated transformation measures ( Bargheer et al., 2017; Ferwerda et al., 2017; Stone & Marques, 2018 ). This is impressively demonstrated by the numerous studies and projects conducted at national and international level; by improved funding structures and new funding models ; and by dynamic initiatives, working groups, and discussion forums. open-access.network (2021) ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Scholarly Books open-access.network (2026) ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Monographs, Collections and Co. You can find a map of terms on open access and books here (in German). Book publications still play an important role, especially in the humanities and social sciences . The text-oriented disciplines favour the more extensive book format in the interests of long argument , where the theoretical approach must be comprehensively set out. Furthermore, the results of inter- and transdiscipli­nary research can be published only to a limited extent in the research report format possible in journal articles. Common types of scholarly books are monographs, edited collections, and conference proceedings. As a rule, scholarly books appear in different editions: as a digital publication, or e-book, and, in addition, as a print volume. They are published either in a series or as a single publication. Substantively and technologically, a large proportion of open access books are digital counterparts of print books. In addition to their content, they also usually contain navigation elements such as tables of contents and figures. However, providing the work in digital form enables in-depth content analysis through multiple apparatuses (footnotes, endnotes, critical editions), as well as enrichment through links to further stocks of knowledge, such as Wikipedia, specialised databases, or primary sources and digitisations. In addition, the e-book format allows the incorporation of research data, virtual research environments, and dynamic objects such as scripts, visualisations or software. What Are Open Access Books? A book is open access when access to the e-book is not restricted by licence or payment barriers, but rather it is available free of charge and re-usable in the long term immediately upon publication. Publishers of open access books can earn revenue through publication fees ( book processing charges, BPCs ) and the sale of the print edition ( dual publishing ), which is often produced using digital print-on-demand technology. Other publishers finance the basic costs of their open access segment via crowdfunding (e.g., Knowledge Unlatched, trans­formative agreements negotiated by consortia) or institutional memberships (e.g., Open Book Publishers [OBP], the Open Library of Humanities [OLH], Language Science Press). As in the case of open access journals , authors and editors of edited collections should not have to grant exclusive rights of use to the publishers or publication platforms. For licensing purposes, it is recommended to use an open Creative Commons licence , such as CC BY or CC BY-SA. Studies suggest that books published in open access gain a larger and more diverse readership ( Lucraft, 2021 ). Besides being made available in open access immediately upon publication ( gold open access ), books, too, can be self-archived in an open access repository ( green open access ; see Green and Gold ). Open Access Books in Specific Subjects Find out here how common open access books are in individual disciplines. Common Myths There are still some common myths about open access publishing. The Open Access Books Toolkit helps dispelling them. Open Access Helpdesk Our Open Access Helpdesk is happy to help with all questions open access. Serials Crisis and Monograph Crisis You Would Like to Know More About the History of Open Access? We have gathered the most important milestones for you here. The reasons why open access for books was neglected for many years date back to the beginnings of the open access movement . Sparked by the serials crisis in the 1990s, the movement emerged in the natural sciences, where book publications traditionally play at most a marginal role. It was only in the mid-2000s that the advent of a monograph crisis ( see Herb, 2015 ) precipitated by the serials crisis became the subject of increasing discussion. Rising book prices, gaps in the supply of scholarly literature in the libraries, and authors who during the publication process performed more and more tasks themselves yet still had to pay some­times high publication cost subsidies: the problems of closed access now became evident in the area of scholarly books. Open Access Books Versus Open Access Journals Against the backdrop of the monograph crisis and the increasing establishment of open access in the area of scholarly journals, calls for open access in the humanities and social sciences also became louder. However, compared with scholarly journals, the publication landscape in the area of books has a number of particularities, the most important of which will be mentioned here (see also Snijder, 2019; Open Access Books Toolkit, 2020 ): In the humanities and in parts of the social sciences, an important role is played by small and medium-sized book publishers that are highly regarded in their specialist areas. Close relationships between authors and publishers are not uncommon. Both groups have in part adopted attitudes to open access that range from wait-and-see to critical, also because the partici­pants in this setting find it harder to maintain the necessary competencies in the rapidly changing publishing landscape. For example, knowledge of the self-archiving rights of authors is sometimes lacking, and authors often have to negotiate with publishers to secure their rights to self-archive their works in a repository . In contrast to scholarly journals, print editions of books are of continuing importance despite generally declining sales figures, and are desired not least by the authors themselves. The dissemination channels and reception processes continue to be geared towards the processing of physical and fee-based objects. Not all books are alike: they range from unostentatious edited collections and conference proceedings, through elaborately designed several-hundred-page monographs, to experimental, multimedia-enriched publication projects. Submission, peer-review, and editorial processes are less standardised than in the area of journals. Especially in the German-speaking area, responsibility for quality assurance lies with editors or publishing house staff (editorial review). The costs of publishing open access books vary greatly. However, because of the larger size of the works, publishing costs are, as a rule, higher than those for articles in open access journals. Furthermore, certain book types, such as handbooks, lexica, or editions, require elaborate editorial processes that are factored in by the publishers. This does not mean, however, that open access books are less cost-efficient than open access journals. In the case of the high-priced open access journals of commercial publishers, the price per page is even several times higher than that of the overwhelming majority of book projects. All these factors make it clear that in order to develop their full potential, the models and tools developed for journals must be adapted to the specific requirements of open access books. This is true not least with a view to developing sustainable business models for small and medium-sized publishers (see also the international project Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs, COPIM ), building suitable publication infrastructures, and developing adequate funding instruments. Both the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the German Research Foundation (DFG) have recently drawn up programmes to address these challenges (BMBF: Richtlinie zur Förderung von Projekten zur Beschleunigung der Transformation zu Open Access [Directive on the Promotion of Projects to Accelerate the Transformation to Open Access] , 2020; DFG: Funding Programme: Open Access Publication Funding , from 2021 onwards). open-access.network (2021) ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Open Access Journals Find an introduction here. Open Access and Research Funders Find an introduction here. Why is Open Access so Complicated with Books? The Open Access Books Toolkit explains how open access books and journals differ. Zukunftsmusik oder State of the Art – Experimentelle Formate für Bücher?" Bericht zur Erhebung" [Pipe Dream or State of the Art – Experimental Formats for Books?] The report summarises key results of a survey conducted within the framework of the project open-access.network. Services for Books Video zum Publizieren von Open-Access-Büchern Quelle: Stern, N. (2020). Publishing your book in Open Access?, open-access.network. https://doi.org/10.5446/52108 ( CC BY 3.0 DE ) Working Group Universitätsverlage Learn more about the members and principles of the working group on university publishers. ScholarLed Learn more about the members and principles of the ScholarLed initiative. Practical Tip Valuable information about community-led publication infrastructures for monographs – for example a report on resources, technical workflows, tools, and platforms – can be found on the website of the COPIM project. Although numerous challenges in transforming books to open access have yet to be mastered, authors already have a wide range of options when it comes to publishing an open access book. Many established publishers have incorpora­ted open access models into their portfolios, and offer gold open access publi­cations using CC licences. Publishers are often also willing to discuss the possi­bility of self-archiving a work in an open access repository after an embargo period (green open access). The fear frequently voiced by publishers that open access leads to serious shortfalls in the sales of print editions has been refuted in various studies ( Graf et al., 2020; Snijder, 2019; Collins & Milloy, 2016 ). Academic presses operated by universities or their libraries are an affordable and high-quality alternative to commercial publishers. The majority of the German-language university presses have joined together in the Arbeits­gemeinschaft der Universitätsverlage (working group of the German-language university presses). They have collaboratively produced a variety of materials on publishing books in open access, including a paper on quality standards ( AG Universitätsverlage, 2018 ) that is also helpful when examining an open access offering and choosing a publisher. And finally, as in the case of journals, there are now a number of publishing initiatives founded by scholars and scientists (e.g., the consortium ScholarLed ). These initiatives are committed to fair open access and stand out because they demonstrate a high degree of transparency with regard to their business models ( see Nordhoff, 2018; Barnes & Gatti, 2020 ). Scholarly books are now increasingly published via institutional publishing platforms ( Open Monograph Press [OMP] , PubPub , Janeway ). These platforms do not use publishing house business models, but rather are funded as a common good, which entails specific challenges. Funding Possibilities In order to relieve the financial burden on authors and editors, many institu­tions now make specific funds available for open access books. Publication funds are also being established at federal state level in Germany. The DFG funding programme Open Access Publication Funding , which was established in 2021, grants institutions an allowance of up to 5,000 euros towards the costs of the open access publication of books resulting from DFG-funded projects. The same amount can be drawn down annually for book publications via project-related publication expenses within the framework of DFG project funding. In addition, DFG publication grants can be awarded for editions of primary texts and manuscript material as well as for works of exceptional scientific importance. For some time now, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) have had dedicated programmes in place for funding open access books. Via the Open Access Monograph Bursary for early career researchers in digital humanities launched by the EU Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH-EU) in 2021, up to 7,000 euros per book can be made available. Video zur Finanzierung von Open-Access-Monographien Quelle: Brinken, H. (2020). Finanzierung von Open-Access-Monographien, open-access.network. https://doi.org/10.5446/49535 ( CC BY 3.0 DE ) Finding Open Access Books Practical Tip Numerous search engines specialise in open access publications and provide free access to full texts There are also special search services for finding open access books. You can find an overview in our Practical Tip for finding open access literature (in German). Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) DOAB is the central data base for open access books, searchable by subject. Open access books are indexed at many locations and are often searchable in the usual databases and search engines. The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) , which also enables a targeted search for books or book chapters, specialises in open access content. In addition, open access books can also be easily found via the popular search engines, for example, Google Scholar. An important role in relation to findability and visibility is played by the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) , the central database for open access books, which can be searched by subject, language, and publisher. The metadata of books indexed in DOAB are harvested for inclusion in diverse library catalogues. The combined online library and publication platform OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) as well as disciplinary repositories for the humanities and social sciences, such as media/rep/ and SSOAR , are suitable for searching for open access books. In addition, the discipline-specific pages on open-access.network offer an introduction. Conclusion and Outlook For decades, open access for books was systematically implemented only by a very small number of protagonists, and thus remained a peripheral phenome­non. Although these pioneers recognised the scientific potential of open access for book-friendly disciplines at an early stage, comprehensive practices, approaches, and providers were lacking. However, although there is still a need to catch up, the area of open access books is now highly dynamic: Extensive studies (e.g., in projects such as COPIM and OPERAS-P ) are being conducted, publication funds are being established or expanded, new business models are being developed, and new publishing projects are being initiated. Moreover, networks like the Open Access Books Network , ENABLE! , or the Focus Group Open Access Books are being founded; manuals are being produced and recommendations are being formulated ( see Adema, 2019; Godel et al., 2020 ); and information platforms, such as the Open Access Books Toolkit initiated by OAPEN, are being created. Further impulses for the transformation of scholarly books to open access are to be expected from the 20 projects to promote the acceleration of the transformation to open access that are being funded by the BMBF from 2021 onwards. Select Projects and Initiatives for Networking COPIM OPERAS-P Open Access Books Network ENABLE! Fokus Group "Open Access Books" Feel free to discuss developments in Open Access Books with experts. Focus Group "Open Access Monograph Funds" Feel free to discuss development in Open Access Monograph Funds with experts. References Adema, J. (2019). Towards a roadmap for open access monographs . Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3238545 Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Universitätsverlage. (2018). Qualitätsstandards für Open-Access-Monografien und -Sammelbände (Version 1). Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3562239 Bargheer, M., Dogan, Z. M., Horstmann, W., Mertens, M., & Rapp, A. (2017). Unlocking the digital potential of scholarly monographs in 21st century research. LIBER Quarterly , 27 (1), 194–211. http://doi.org/10.18352/lq.10174 Barnes, L. & Gatti, R. (2020, May 28). The cost of open access books: A publisher writes. Open Book Publishers. https://blogs.openbookpublishers.com/the-cost-of-open-access-books-a-publisher-writes/ Collins, E., & Milloy, C. (2016). OAPEN-UK final report: A five-year study into open access monograph publishing in the humanities and social sciences (p. 94). https://oapen.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/7a65d73f1087444d80807833a320fa36.pdf Ferwerda, E., Pinter, F., & Stern, N. (2017). A landscape study on open access and monographs: Policies, funding and publishing in eight European countries . Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.815932 Godel, R., Herb, U., Hillenkötter, K., Holzer, Angela, Nordhoff, S., Schäffler, H., Siegert, O., & Arbeitsgruppe “Wissenschaftliches Publikationssystem” der Schwerpunktinitiative „Digitale Information“ der Allianz der deutschen Wissenschaftsorganisationen. (2020). Förderung wissenschaftlicher Buchpublikationen im Open Access (Open-Access-Bücher): Standards und Richtlinien für die Gestaltung infrastruktureller Rahmenbedingungen und die Vergabe von Fördermitteln durch wissenschaftliche Einrichtungen: Handreichung der AG Wissenschaftliches Publikationssystem im Rahmen der Schwerpunktinitiative „Digitale Information“ der Allianz der deutschen Wissenschaftsorganisationen . 13 p. https://doi.org/10.3249/ALLIANZOA.014 Graf, D., Fadeeva, Y., & Falkenstein-Feldhoff, K., (Eds.) (2020). Bücher im Open Access. Ein Zukunftsmodell für die Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften? Verlag Barbara Budrich. https://www.doi.org/10.17185/duepublico/72237 Herb, U. (2015). Open Science in der Soziologie: Eine interdisziplinäre Bestandsaufnahme zur offenen Wissenschaft und eine Untersuchung ihrer Verbreitung in der Soziologie. Schriften zur Informationswissenschaft 67. Verlag Werner Hülsbusch. https://doi.org/10.22028/D291-23737 Lucraft, M. (2021, March 3). Open Access to academic books creates larger, more diverse and more equitable readerships. LSE Impact Blog . https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2021/03/03/open-access-to-academic-books-creates-larger-more-diverse-and-more-equitable-readerships/ Nordhoff, S. (2018). Cookbook for open access books . Language Science Press. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1286925 Open Access Books Toolkit (2020, October 29). The difference between an open access book and an open access journal . https://oabooks-toolkit.org/the-oabooks-landscape/1323435-oa-books-vs-oa-journals;jsessionid=08F1DF2737084E6DAD2E12BE59C55FD0 Snijder, R. (2019). The deliverance of open access books. Examining usage and dissemination . Amsterdam University Press. https://www.doi.org/10.26530/OAPEN_1004809 Stone, G., & Marques, M. (2018). Knowledge Exchange survey on open access monographs . Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1475446 Further Reading Neylon, C., Ozaygen, A., Montgomery, L., Huang, C.-K. (Karl), Pyne, R., Lucraft, M., & Emery, C. (2021). More readers in more places: The benefits of open access for scholarly books. Insights , 34 (1), 1-27. https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.558 Snijder, R. (2023). Measured in a context: making sense of open access book data. Insights the UKSG Journal , 36 , 20. https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.627 Taylor, M. (2020). An Altmetric Attention Advantage for Open Access Books in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Scientometrics , 125 (3), 2523–43. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03735-8 ....

  10. Open Access Classical Studies

    What is Open Access? Find an introduction here. Source: based on Brinken, H. (2021). 10 Gründe für Open Access. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4643859 ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Open Access: Pros and Cons Find an introduction here. Open Access in Classical Studies Classical studies – or classics – is an umbrella term for all disciplines that study the cultures of classical antiquity and the early history of the Near East and Eu­rope, with a particular focus on linguistic and material heritage. Because of the heterogeneity of these disciplines, it is difficult to make generalisations about the development of open access in classical studies. Nonetheless, a move towards open access publishing has taken place in the various sub-disciplines of classical studies in recent years. For example, Heidelberg University Library and Propylaeum – the Specialized Information Service Ancient Studies, together with representatives of the offices for the protection of monuments ( Landesdenkmal­ämter ) of the German federal states and the professional associations in the field of classical studies in Germany, have developed strategies for digital publishing in archaeology (see Mainzer Thesen zum Open Access Publizieren in der Archäologie ). And in Egyptology, ancient history, and classical philology, a number of important journals and book series are now published open access. Of note here, for example, is the project Digital Classics Online , which was started by scholars of ancient history at the University of Leipzig. Its outputs also include the creation of the series Digital Classics Books . Open Access Journals As of March 2024, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listed 226 open access journals under the search terms archaeology, ancient history, Greek language and literature, Latin language and literature, and history of the Greco-Roman world . In addition to these newly founded journals, existing journals are being retrodigitised and made available in open access. New editions of these journals either appear simultaneously in print and online, or the digital version is made freely available online upon expiry of an embargo period (moving wall). Important open access journals include: Aegyptiaca. Journal of the History of Reception of Ancient Egypt CIPEG Journal: Ancient Egyptian & Sudanese Collections and Museums Archäologische Informationen Archaeology International DOAJ Axon. Greek historical inscriptions DOAJ Ciceroniana DOAJ Digital Classics Online DOAJ Forum Classicum Frankfurter elektronische Rundschau zur Altertumskunde Fundberichte Hessen Digital Gallia DOAJ Göttinger Forum für Altertumswissenschaft Journal of Greek Linguistics DOAJ Journal of Neolithic Archaeology DOAJ Pylon. Editions and Studies of Ancient Texts Tyche – Beiträge zur Alten Geschichte, Papyrologie und Epigraphik In collaboration with Propylaeum – the Specialized Information Service Ancient Studies, the University of Heidelberg provides a technical infrastructure for the publi­cation of open access journals . The service is addressed to classicists world­wide. As of March 2024, 48 open access journals were being made available via Propylaeum. In addition, via its platform iDAI.publications , the German Archaeological Insti­tute (DAI) provides open access to digitally available journals (and monographs) of its own institute, for example Archäologischer Anzeiger , Chiron and e-Forschungsberichte . The Ancient World Online ( AWOL ) from the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University provides a List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies (last updated on February 2026). What are Open Access Journals? Find an introduction here. Practical Tip Publishing Open Access: How to evaluate a journal's quality Video on the Funding of Open Access Articles Source: Becklas Dorow, C., Hauss, J. (2026). Funding Open Access Articles – What Are the Options?. Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB), open-access.network. https://doi.org/10.5446/73596 ( CC BY 3.0 DE ) open-access.network (2026) ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Open Access Publishing and Self-Archiving Find an introduction here. 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 2274 titles from the area of classical studies under subjects such as archaeology, ancient history to c 500 CE, classical history/classical civilisation , etc. The OAPEN Library listed over 2024 titles from the field of classical studies (as of March 2024). The open access publication platform Propylaeum eBOOKs , which is provided by Heidelberg University Library, makes scholarly monographs from the fields of Egyptology, ancient history, Byzantine studies, classical archaeology, classical philology, medieval and neo-Latin philology, and pre- and early history available in open access. The works are either first-time publications ( gold open access ) or self-archived digital versions of monographs published elsewhere ( green open access ). The service, which is free of charge, is addressed to classical studies scholars worldwide. Also worthy of note is the series Berlin Studies of the Ancient World published by Edition Topoi . The Ancient World Online ( AWOL ) from the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University provides an Alphabetical List of Open Access Monograph Series in Ancient Studies (last updated on February 2026). Disciplinary Repositories Propylaeum-DOK is the disciplinary repository of Propylaeum – the Specialized Information Service (FID) Ancient Studies. Scholars of classical studies can publish discipline-specific digital works (monographs, articles, conference papers, etc.) at no cost to readers and free of access restrictions. The self-archiving of digital versions of works already published in print form elsewhere is also possible and desired. As of February 2023, Propylaeum-DOK contained over 5,550 open access publications. 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. Other Offerings Subject portals and platforms Propylaeum – Specialized Information Service Ancient Studies : an information and service portal for classical studies operated by Heidelberg University Library and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Bavarian State Library, BSB) Databases and the like PropylaeumSEARCH : Propylaeum’s central search portal, via which subject bibliographies, specific subject sections of relevant library catalogues, and full-text data sources can be simultaneously searched iDAI.objects arachne : the central object database of the German Archaeo­logical Institute (DAI) and the Archaeological Institute of the University of Cologne; it is also part of the portal iDAI.world . Image Databases Beazley Archive Pottery Database : Operated by the Classical Art Research Centre (CARC) at the University of Oxford, this is the world’s largest photo­graphic archive devoted to ancient Greek pottery. Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum : a database operated by the Classical Art Research Centre (CARC) on behalf of the Union Académique Internationale (UAI), via which over 400 digitized catalogues of ancient pottery from 24 countries can be made freely available. Virtual Catalogue of Roman Coins (VCRC) : contains images and descrip­tions of coins from the Early Republic up to the end of the 4th century A.D. Open Science in Classical Studies Edition Topoi, Collections : an information infrastructure for the peer-reviewed publication of open access research data, such as 3D models, high resolution images, data, and databases Research data at Propylaeum : Besides the possibility of self-archiving data in institutional research data repositories, the research data associated with open access works published or hosted by Propylaeum can be preserved in the long-term via Propylaeum. Research data at IANUS : German research data centre for digital data from archaeology and classical studies Open Access Ancient Language Textbooks, OERs, and Primers from The Ancient World Online ( AWOL ) open-access.network ( CC BY 4.0 International ) Literatur Further Reading Mainzer Thesen zum Open Access Publizieren in der Archäologie (ein Entwurf) . (2018). Propylaeum.de. https://www.propylaeum.de/fileadmin/media/publizieren/Mainzer_Thesen_draft_2018_04_11-2.pdf Content editor of this page: Dr Katrin Bemmann, Heidelberg University Library (Last updated: February 2023)....

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