What is Open Access?
Open Access (OA) means that scholarly publications can be accessed and read by everybody in the world, unrestricted and free of charge. Furthermore, OA means that research results can be re-used as flexibly and unrestrictedly as possible. OA publications are always electronic, resp. online publications that may additionally be published in print.
Readers benefit from OA because they can access scholarly publications immediately and without any paywalls. Authors of OA publications benefit because OA publications are usually read and cited more frequently than non-OA publications.
There are two essential pathways of OA publishing: Direct OA publishing through a publisher and OA publication of a manuscript concurrently to the publisher’s version, or after a delay. Both pathways will be described below. Of equal importance is that OA publications are made legally sound through licencing – please find more information below, as well.
Open Access directly through a publisher
Gold OA
Gold OA publications are published immediately in Open Access, including journal articles, books or other forms.
In Gold OA, fees incur for the authors. (article/book processing charges, APCs resp. BPCs). The
GU Open Access Publication Fund can in many instances cover these publication fees for journal articles.
Additionally, expected publication expenses can be applied for in many funding applications at research funding institutions.
Diamond OA
A growing number of publishers and journals offers free OA publishing for authors and readers. This means that contrary to Gold OA, no publication fee incurs for authors.
This form of OA is called Diamond Open Access. Diamond OA is the easiest and fairest form of OA to all parties involved. This is why the university library supports numerous
Diamond-OA-Initiatives.
Hybrid OA: Open Access in Closed Access journals
Another form of immediate OA is called »hybrid Open Access«. Here, publishers offer the option to “buy out” an article from a conventional »closed-access«-journal
through paying a publication fee. This praxis is controversial, since publishers are earning twice: Once through subscription or licencing fees, paid by the libraries, and once through the
hybrid publication fee.
The GU OA-publication fund only supports hybrid OA if the publishers plan to successively flip their journals to OA, as regulated by transformative agreements. Well-known examples are
the current agreements with Wiley and
Springer Nature (the so called »DEAL agreements«).
The following publishers offer free hybrid OA publication to GU members:
- American Institute of Physics (AIP)
- BMJ Publishing
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Company of Biologists
- De Gruyter
- Elsevier
- Hogrefe
- IOP (Institute of Physics)
- John Benjamins
- Karger
- Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC)
- SAGE
- SpringerNature
- Taylor & Francis (T&F)
- Wiley
Open Access concurrently to a publisher’s version or after a delay
Green OA
Sometimes a journal or a publisher does not offer any or no affordable direct OA option. In many cases authors still have the option to make certain manuscript versions available in OA either concurrently to the publisher’s version, or after a delay. This is called “green Open Access” or “self-archiving”. No costs for authors incur
In journal publishing, more and more „preprints” are made available long before the articles are published in a journal. Authors make the manuscript version available on
subject-specific preprint servers that they submit to a publisher.
Preprint servers are well-established in a number of disciplines, such as
- PsyArXiv - Psychologie
- EarthArXiv - Geowissenschaften
Additionally, many journals offer the option to make the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM, also known as “postprint”) freely accessible. This means the accepted, final version of the
manuscript after the peer review process (but without the publisher’s layout). This option is often available for contributions to edited volumes, as well.
German copyright law in many cases enables authors to publish AAMs 12 months after the publication of the journal article in OA, e.g. on the
Goethe University repository.
Many publishers explicitly grant such rights to authors, as well. In some cases, it is even permitted to make the final publisher’s version available on a repository after a certain embargo
period (this more and more frequently applies to contributions to edited volumes in the humanities, as well). The university library’s OA team is happy to support you in self-archiving your
publications.
Licencing OA publications
When publishing in OA, authors do not surrender all usage rights to a publisher, as is the case with conventional publishing. Licences regulate in what form texts can be disseminated and re-used. Usually, Creative Commons (CC) licences are issued.
According to most research funding institutions and OA experts Goethe University endorses the utilization of the freest CC licence CC-BY. Only the CC-BY licence enables re-use
in the full sense of the OA idea.
The "BY" component ensures that authors must in all cases be named as the work’s creators. For journal articles, in particular, authors should insist that their publications are licensed
under a CC-BY licence and no more restrictive variants are applied.
- The German Research Foundation’s call to utilize open licences/], with extensive further information
- detailed informationen on CC licences
- comprehensive FAQ on CC licences
Feel free to contact the Open Access team.
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zuletzt geändert am 11. Januar 2024
