Open Access

Open Access (OA) refers to an alternative form of scientific publishing and aims to make scientific works accessible worldwide free of charge without technical or legal barriers on the internet immediately upon publication. OA publishing is intended to accelerate the scientific communication process, improve the visibility of research results, promote international and interdisciplinary networking and thus increase research efficiency. The exploitation rights for OA publications remain with the authors. By granting Open Content licences (including Creative Commons licences), rights of use can be defined and further processing and use of OA publications can be regulated.

The Declaration of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002), published in 2002, is the first of numerous international and national initiatives calling for free access to scientific information. The "Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities" (2003), published in 2003 and signed by Paderborn University on 01.09.2022, is considered a milestone of the OA movement.

In its "Open Access Policy " published on 20.02.2023, Paderborn University recommends that its scientists publish their research results in an open access manner and thus make them available to the worldwide scientific community as well as to the general public.

The University Library supports authors of the University with a range of services and offers for OA publishing.

Open Access Services of the University Library

The University Library's publication service is a platform through which members of the University and institutions associated with the University can publish research results and other documents in the spirit of Open Access. The UB guarantees integrity and authenticity for the documents published here. Persistent identifiers (DOI, URN) ensure, among other things, that the publications can be permanently found in comprehensive catalogues and portals as well as with search engines and are thus citable. For legally compliant use, all publications are provided with Open Content licences (Creative Commons licences).

Both first and second publications are possible.

The first publication of scientific and scholarly works in pure Open Access journals, Open Access monographs or in Open Access anthologies or conference proceedings is referred to as Gold Open Access. The works are usually quality-assured in the form of peer review or editorial review. Once published, the works are accessible worldwide free of charge and are usually published with an open content licence. The difference to the classic business model is the complete waiver of subscription and licence fees that academic libraries or other institutions or individuals pay to publishers for subscriptions to printed journals or for access to electronic resources (databases, journals, monographs, ...).

Please note that authors may be charged publication fees, so-called Article Processing Charges (APCs) or Book Processing Charges (BPCs), for Gold Open Access publishing.

Authors at Paderborn University have the following options

  • the possibility of funding through the University's Open Access Publication Fund as well as
    .
  • Funding or discount possibilities for APCs due to the participation of the University Library in so-called transformation agreements as well as in other licence agreements.
    Information on this can be found on the page: Publishing Agreements (support through existing publishing agreements).

The secondary publication of publications in an (inter)disciplinary or institutional Open Access repository is referred to as Green Open Access. Publications whose first publication was not Open Access with a publisher are thus made accessible worldwide free of charge and usually published under an Open Content licence.

Second publications are possible

The Paderborn University strongly recommends its authors to make sure that in their author contract (also called publishing contract) such a second publication in repositories is explicitly permitted parallel to the first publication or after a certain embargo period (max. 12 months since first publication) in the accepted manuscript version (postprint), better still in the publishing layout of the first publication.

1. secondary publication of articles published in journals

  • The contents of the author's contract (also known as the publishing contract) regarding secondary publication are legally binding.
  • In addition to the rights granted in the author's contract, Section 38 (4) UrhG regulates the so-called secondary publication right for articles published in journals. It states that after the expiry of an embargo (blocking period) of 12 months from the date of publication, authors may "otherwise reproduce, distribute and make available to the public works published in periodical collections". Accordingly, authors may make their publications in the accepted manuscript version (postprint), which were created in the context of research activities funded at least half with public funds, available to the public after 12 months have elapsed since the first publication, provided this does not serve any commercial purpose.
  • If there is no author's contract, the SHERPA/RoMEO platform and the respective publisher's websites provide an overview of the publisher's conditions for second publication.

2. secondary publication of monographs and articles published in monographs/collective works

  • Unlike journal articles, there is no legal basis for the secondary publication of monographs or articles in monographs, nor is there a central platform for proving publishing conditions. This is due to the individual design of the author contract for each monograph and publisher.
  • In the case of monographs and articles that have already been published, authors should contact the publisher to find out the conditions for a second publication. The possibility of a second publication of the monograph or article with fixed embargo periods should ideally be arranged with the publisher before publication.

In its digitisation centre, the University Library digitises and makes accessible books and journals that are in its holdings or in the holdings of cooperating libraries and that are copyright-free or from which the UB has acquired permission for digitisation, and makes them available via its 'Digital Collections' as open access publications for free and worldwide use. They are listed in the library's catalogue and other research tools, as are retro-digitised works from other academic libraries in NRW.

We will be happy to inform you about the different variants of open access publishing.