What is open access?

The aim of Open Access is to make scientific literature and materials freely accessible and reusable. As required by the Berlin Declaration , an essential aspect of open access is maximizing the dissemination of scientific information. signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Scientific Knowledge and thus supports the global Open Access initiative.

The advantages of open access content include immediate access, visibility, the best possible attention to the results of scientific research (impact) and the possibility of further use in accordance with the usage licenses.

More information on open access

What publication channels does Open Access offer?

At the beginning of a publication, the decision is made as to how the research results are to be published.

Basically, two different Open Access strategies can be distinguished: the golden and the green way.

The golden path refers to the first open access publication in journals, as a monograph or as an article in an anthology.

The green way (also known as self-archiving) refers to secondary publication in interdisciplinary or subject-specific repositories.

Where and at what price can you publish in Open Access journals?

If you would like to publish your manuscript Open Access in a specialist journal, but do not know exactly which one, the checklist on the quality of Open Access journals help you in your decision-making process.

B!SION suggests suitable open access journals using semantic and bibliometric methods. To do this, add information from your manuscript, e.g. B. Enter an abstract or DOI into the form.

Use the oa.finder to find out which OA journals exist. The oa.finder shows you from over 55,000 journals which are Gold Open Access and what impact they have. Furthermore, oa.finder shows whether and to what extent Article Processing Charges (APCs) are levied. In the form, select your publication type "journal article", your role in the submission process and the "Technical University of Central Hesse" Technische Hochschule Mittelhessen the scientific institution.

If you would like to apply for the cost of your APCs to be covered, please fill out our Open Access Publications Funding Application .

In which repositories can you publish?

Basically, there is a difference between interdisciplinary and subject-specific repositories.

Both types of repositories make the publications permanently freely available and thus increase visibility. Furthermore, repositories are integrated into search engines and specialist portals. In general, you can store your publications in several repositories, provided that you have the appropriate usage rights.

The THM - under the leadership of the university library - operates an interdisciplinary repository with its publication server in which all university members can store their documents.

CERN maintains and develops the ZENODO . Zenodo is a free, multidisciplinary repository. It is part of a Europe-wide Open Access infrastructure.

Search platforms for further repositories are:

• The German Network Initiative for Network Information (DINI) offers a list of German repositories .
• The open access network initiative offers a list of interdisciplinary repositories .