Open Access

Open Access has grown in recent years in a number of different ways depending on the discipline: while Open Access is clearly increasingly important in the natural sciences, some disciplines have reservations about using it, especially in the humanities. The challenge is to highlight the benefits of Open Access for the different publication cultures of each respective discipline.

Service-oriented and user-friendly services and infrastructure can help promote the acceptance of Open Access. In this sense, the partner organizations in the Allianz der deutschen Wissenschaftsorganisationen (Alliance of German Science Organisations) support Open Access in many ways. 

Benefits of Open Access:

Through the Golden Path of Open Access, the first publication of scientific articles is done via an electronic medium, such as a journal, which is operated under an Open Access business model. Open Access publications are subject to the same standards of quality as traditional publications.

The business models of the Golden Way change the way publications are funded: currently, research organizations and sponsors finance the publications through so-called publication fees. A number of Open Access journals are published and funded as part of the scientific activities of individual organizations. Publication fees are generally not charged for these journals. Thus, the Golden Path promotes the decoupling of information demand from the financial budget constraints of the recipient.

Many scientific publishers operate using so-called hybrid Open Access models: for publications in a subscription-based (and therefore not freely accessible) journal, a single article can, with payment of a supplementary publication fee, be published under Open Access.

The Green Path is dedicated to aggregating already published commercial publications and other digital information in repositories (open access databases). A discinction is made between institutional and disciplinary repositories. While institutional repositories represent the scientific activities of individual institutions, disciplinary repositories are used to store the publications for an entire discipline. Institutional repositories serve to make the research visible under the "brand" of a particular institution. The vast majority of academic publishers allow the delayed publication of the author's version of an article in repositories.