Open Access Overview

Benefits through Open Access for researchers

 

Definition
Open Access is  now  a recognized part of the system of scholary communication. The technical precondition for its success story was electronic publication.

Several declarations defined and supported Open Access — one the most influential was the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities launched in autumn 2003. The list of signatories reads like a who’s who of European scientific institutions and organizations and it is still growing.

„By 'open access' to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet […] without financial, legal, or technical barriers […]“ (from  "Budapest Open Access Initiative")

Open Access will be implemented through two  publication strategies:

 

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    Green road: the self archiving of a peer reviewed article in a full-text database, a so-called institutional repository.

 

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    Golden road: the primary publication of an article in a scientific journal, that makes its articles immediately online freely accessible after publication.

Open Access is visible

The main advantage of Open Access is the increased global dissemination of knowledge along with the improved reception by the scientific community. Citation rates grow through t free accessibility.

Open Access literature is peer reviewed

For Open Access journals (golden) the same quality standards apply as for publications in traditional journals.

The quality assurance of a deposit article (green) is already performed - during the peer reviewing process of the journal, in which the article is primary published.

Open Access is legal

If you publish an article in a 'traditional' journal, archive the postprint in a freely accessible full-text database (publication database, institutional repository).  Most publishers accept secondary publishing and the number of such repositories is growing steadily.

Open Access is easy

Publish your article in an Open Access journal or in a repository - both ways are simple. The library makes secondary publishing easy.