About Open Access
What is Open Access?
Source: Brinken, H., Hauss, J. & Rücknagel, J. (2021). Open Access in 60 Sekunden, open-access.network. https://doi.org/10.5446/50831
What is Open Access?
Open Access refers to free access to scientific information on the internet. This means that access and use are free of charge and are not subject to any other restrictions.
In accordance with the Berlin Declaration of Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, this means that authors and holders of rights grant all users the irrevocable right not only to receive scientific publications, but also to download and reuse them, to modify them (if applicable) and, in turn, to publish the hereby generated results. In order for this process to be legally compliant, OA documents must be provided with appropriate licences that ensure a clear regulation of of use, reproduction and redistribution. Creative Commons licences are an established and widely-used example for these licences.
Advantages of Open Access
Open Access facilitates fast and free access to scientific information for everyone worldwide. This forms the foundation for a good supply of information as well as efficient research and innovation.
Due to their free availability, OA publications are easily found, which often leads to increased utiliasation and thus to higher citations rates. Additionally, OA publications are copyrighted. In contrast to traditional publishing contracts, authors of OA publications generally only grant a non-exclusive right of use. This is due to the free usability of the publication in contrast to the exclusive distribution by a publisher. The use of licences, which are as unrestrictive as possible (e.g. Creative Commons) is therefore very important.
Many research funding organisations and institutions have included Open Access as a requirement to their funding guidelines. This is to ensure that publicly funded research output is available to the general public.
Pathways to Open Access
Gold Open Access refers to scientific works which are first published in Open Access, for example as research articles in purely Open Access journals, as monographs, or as contributions to an edited volume or conference proceedings.
As publishers cannot generate any income from sales or licensing with this type of Open Access publication, the authors or editors are usually charged with publication fees. These fees are called Article Processing Charges (APCs) or Book Processing Charges (BPCs). We gladly support HHU researchers with financing of golden Open Access publications via the HHU Open Access Fund and publishing contracts with a publishing component.
Green Open Access - also known as self-archiving - refers to the secondary publication of scientific works on institutional or disciplinary Open Access repositories. These works were initially published in Closed Access by a publisher and are subsequently published in Open Access (e.g. after an embargo period has expired).