Open Access

 

General information about Open Access 

Open Access (OA) stands for free and public access to scientific literature, as well as for securing copyrights for authors. Open Access publishing is now considered an essential part of good scientific work and is required by national and international research funding organisations.

LIV supports publishers in publishing scientific articles and university theses in Open Access:

  • Participation in publishing collaborations to enable cost-effective OA publishing (especially with DEAL partner publishers Springer, Wiley, and Elsevier)
  • Providing our own open access servers for the publication of university theses
  • Comprehensive training and consulting services related to Open Access

Publishing collaborations: DEAL and other transformation agreements

The DEAL and other transformation agreements are intended to contribute to the Open Access transformation. This means that the agreements are intended to help bring about a complete transition of scientific publishing to Open Access.

The DEAL project (also known as the DEAL Consortium) was established to advance this goal. It deals with the negotiation, conclusion and implementation of transformative Germany-wide Open Access agreements with the three largest scientific publishers (Elsevier, Springer, Wiley).

Universities participating in these agreements receive various benefits:

  • Reading access to the journal portfolio of the associated publisher
  • Publication of OA publications under specified conditions
  • Reduced publication fees

Open Access Server for academic papers

  • DHBW
  • HHN
  • TUM Heilbronn

Members of DHBW and DHBW CAS can find detailed information about Open Access (OA) and OA publications on the website of the Competence Centre for Repository and Open Access Services (ROAD@DHBW).

  • Publishing cooperation (Open Access publishing with DEAL)
  • DHBW repository (Open Access server for publications)
  • Training & consulting (publication support services)

The OPUS HHN, Heilbronn University's academic publication server, will be the long-term repository for the university bibliography. It can be used to search for HHN publications.
OPUS contains full texts and, in some cases, links to the documents. Publications can also be made available on OPUS HHN. Once published, the texts are available worldwide on the internet and are permanently archived by the library.

Members of TUM can find detailed information about Open Access (OA) and OA publications on the website of the Technical University of Munich Library.

Predatory Publishing

Under the guise of being a reputable Open Access publisher, unscrupulous publishers offer publishing services in exchange for publication fees, but fail to deliver these services or deliver them inadequately. This is known as predatory publishing.

To avoid this, the following criteria can be used for a quality-assured selection:

  • Publisher: The publisher is easily identifiable and accessible.
  • Process: The quality assurance process is transparent.
  • Indexing: The journal is indexed in a recognised database.
  • Costs: There is clear information about costs and charging.

Links and brief information on OA research tools/helpful websites

  • BASE
  • Bison
  • DOAJ
  • EZB
  • OA.network
  • OA.finder

BASE - Bielefeld Academic Search Engine

  • Search engine for scientific web documents
  • Index with over 400 million references
  • Approximately 60% of these are OA

Bison – Bibliometric and Semantic Open Access Recommender Network

  • Recommendation service for quality-assured Open Access journals, according to thematic relevance/bibliometric analysis)

DOAJ – Directory of Open Access Journals

  • Index of OA journals
  • Various peer review models
  • Information on costs, open content licence, publisher and Open Access policy

EZB – Electronic Journal Library

  • Index of electronically published journals
  • Specification of OA model (full OA or hybrid journal)
  • Traffic light display for licensing by own university (Closed Access)

Open access network

  • Information portal with answers to the most important questions about Open Access.

Open Access finder

  • Research tool for scientific publications with approx. 55,000 journals

FAQs Open Access