Open Science Resources & Tools

There are practical and political reasons for publishing Open Access (OA). From a practical point of view, the free availability of one's own publications leads to a broader reception; and the more widely one's own work is received, the greater the expected impact. For this reason alone, it is advisable to place at least a proportion of one's own publications in Open Access journals and book series.

However, the political reasons set out in many of the founding documents (e.g. the Budapest Declaration of 2002) of the OA movement seem to be more important: Making scientific results available for free re-use is a self-commitment within the framework of good scientific practice; making this re-use free of charge for readers* is an imperative of fairness. Both points are all the more important because electronic access to and availability of scientific literature is the new publishing standard.

In what Open Access is, a basic distinction is made between the immediate free publication of scientific literature (golden path) and the subsequent making available of scientific literature that has already been published (green path).What is new about these forms of publishing is that with OA Gold, the publication costs are no longer borne by readers; the "green road", on the other hand, makes it possible to publish research manuscripts (preprints) in advance or to make scientific literature available after certain deadlines (embargoes).

Emerging Open Access publication technology also poses the question of new forms of publishing research results as well as general accessibility. HIIG supports publishing developments towards bibliiodiversity, for example through its scientific transfer formats (Digital Salon), hybrid publication venues (elephant in the lab), and Open Access journals with high standards of barrier-free design (Internet Policy Review). Publications at HIIG thus stand not only for high scientific quality, but also for innovative research accessibility with an inclusive character. 

In addition to 'true' Open Access platforms, researchers also disseminate their research papers on commercial publication platforms, such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu. Although these platforms contribute to the Open Access dissemination of scientific research, they are only recommended to a limited extent due to incomplete metadata and non-transparent criteria for quality assurance and long-term archiving (e.g., lack of DOI).

No. The content quality of publications does not depend on the access modalities of their publication, but on complex quality assurance procedures of the respective disciplinary context. In addition, in the international discourse on recognition and reputation, there are various ways to measure the impact of a journal, a publication, or authors.

Both in the case of quality assurance and in the science policy recognition system, Open Access publications open up opportunities and possibilities: Open forms of scientific peer review are emerging, quality criteria for publications are being reweighted, for example in the context of transdisciplinary or interdisciplinary debates, and alternative methods of measuring the scope of a research paper are being developed.

At the same time, cases of publishing misconduct can also be documented in the context of the OA transformation, for example when quality assurance processes are undermined in favor of short publication periods or when publication is linked primarily to the payment of a publication fee. These methods of so-called "predatory publishing" are the exception; the seriousness of a journal or publisher can be easily checked by oneself using various criteria, initiatives such as "Think. Check. Submit" provide support here.

Open access publications are characterised by transparent licensing regulations for subsequent use. The rights of use can be designed openly by the authors and allow not only free access, but also the dissemination of the respective research results in the sense of a general property. There are different licensing models; Creative Commons is widely used and recognized.

The Creative Commons licensing model offers different, modular licence types and allows authors to define usage rights to suit their needs. From simple attribution (CC BY) to severe restrictions on editing and contexts of use (CC BY-NC-ND), the licence types can be used to regulate the handling of publications and data in a transparent, international, and generally understandable manner.

The individual licence types vary in their openness and are not always suitable for fulfilling far-reaching definitions of "genuine open access" (such as in the Berlin Declaration on Open Access). The exclusion of commercial use (NC) or modified dissemination (ND) initially appears to make sense from the author's point of view, but may make the publications and data harder to find or less useful for teaching.

In the case of research data, it should be noted that simple re-use regulations (e.g., through Creative Commons licensing models) must also be considered against the background of database law aspects. For example, intellectual property rights should first be established, which in many cases does not refer to the data itself, but only to the creative parts or structuring of the data. On these legal aspects, it is advisable to take a look at the section of the cross-institutional Infoportal on research data. There are separate regulations especially for the increasingly important issue of automated analysis of larger amounts of data (text and data mining), which are specifically depicted in copyright law (§ 60d).

Against this background, HIIG supports initiatives to promote "Free Cultural Works" and encourages its researchers to pursue "true" Open Access: Attribution (CC BY) and sharing under the same conditions (CC BY-SA) should be the only restrictions on use.

The OA community is well organised and networked. A curated overview of 'real' OA journals is provided by the Directory of Open Access Journals, with filtering options by subject, license, and publisher. A comparable listing for OA  books is provided by the Directory of Open Access Books; individual titles are listed here. In addition, a large number of OA publishers have joined forces in the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association -- this includes HIIG and the OA journal "Internet Policy Review". An extended and annotated compilation can also be found in the Open Access Directory.

Overall, when choosing a journal, book series, or publisher, one should always look for recognized quality assurance procedures, a license that is as free as possible (e.g., CC BY or CC BY-SA), and fair and transparent publication fees (an overview is provided by the Open APC Initiative).

Open Access is the new standard for scientific research publishing. This means that options for Open Access belong in all publishing contracts, and the option of free first publication (Gold) and self-archiving (Green) should always be considered.

If the publication is to be made directly freely available (OA Gold), the publication fee charged by the publisher (APC for articles; BPC for books) should be checked for proportionality; it should also be avoided to publish in journals that charge article fees and additionally demand subscription fees for access to the journal (the case with "hybrid journals"; so-called "double dipping"). The amount and type of publication fees are in fact crucial to enable reimbursement from publication funds or accounting via project budgets.

If the publication is not to be made freely available immediately, but only subsequently (for example in repositories), the deadline and the respective version of the second publication must be negotiated: Many publishers offer an embargo period of 12 to 24 months for the manuscript version; the publication of a paginated publisher's version often has to be agreed separately, but is desirable with a view to citability. Experience shows that there is considerable room for negotiation here; the legislator has also granted authors a right to "secondary exploitation" under certain conditions in the case of dependent publications (e.g. articles in specialist journals) (cf. Section 38, Paragraph 4 of the Copyright Act).

Open access publications cost money, because publishing and editorial work must be remunerated. Some journals and publishers therefore charge authors publication fees, so-called "Article Processing Charges (APC)" or "Book Processing Charges (BPC)". A comparative overview of the average amount of these fees at different institutions provides more detailed information.

There are different ways to finance these publication fees. First, many research funders explicitly provide publication and OA flat rates, i.e., they cover article and book fees up to a certain limit and under certain conditions (e.g., linkage to a project already supported by the funder). It is advisable to consider any publication costs already in the application phase and to budget accordingly.

In addition, many universities and university libraries have publication funds (see overview) from which publication fees (usually only Article Processing Charges) can be reimbursed for their own researchers upon application and up to a cap. HIIG also has its own small publication fund from which OA publications can be funded upon application and under certain conditions (contact: Jennifer Wollniok).

No general statements can be made about funding for collaborative projects and co-authorships: Research funders often have different guidelines on the mode and quota of OA publications from the respective projects; in addition, funding and financing for co-authorships often depends on the institutional affiliation of the corresponding authors. The HIIG Open Access Officer will be happy to advise on this in individual cases (marcel.wrzesinski@hiig.de).

The green road of Open Access is built on (self-)archiving of already published material. Documents and data can be stored in appropriate repositories, which are either responsible for specific institutions or disciplinary contexts; repositories store the documents/data in a structured way and index them in a relevant way. To select trusted Open Access repositories, it is recommended to search the Directory of Open Access Repositories or the Registry of Open Access Repositories.

For storage in repositories, the documents/data usually need to be supplemented with information about the documents/data (metadata). HIIG recommends certain standards to its researchers for this purpose, which can generally improve the findability of documents/data.

In order to be able to deposit documents/data in repositories, certain licensing conditions must be met. In the case of independent publications (monographs, anthologies, etc.), the publisher must give its consent to secondary publication in the repository. In the case of dependent publications (e.g. articles in professional journals), there is a right to "secondary exploitation" in Germany under certain conditions (cf. Section 38, Paragraph 4 of the Copyright Act). If the conditions are met, an article can be archived and thus made accessible even without the publisher's consent.

Even if a higher impact of Open Access research is critically discussed, free and Open Access to publications enables their wider dissemination and thus tends to broaden their reception. OA publishing using free licences is therefore a first step towards reaching a larger audience for one's own research. In addition, it is worthwhile to carefully provide one's own publications with complete accompanying information (metadata): for this purpose, initiatives are recommended that clearly identify the publication and author on the Internet (Digital Object Identifier for documents; Author Identifier for persons).

The Science Communication department at HIIG (Frederik Efferenn) provides additional support in increasing the visibility of publications. It makes sense to think about a smart transfer of scientific results to the public early in the publication process or to seek advice on this. In addition, all publications should be fully 'tracked' in the HIIG database, i.e. with a complete bibliography and a meaningful abstract; it should also be considered to publish central results of the publication in an abbreviated version on the HIIG Digital Society Blog.

Making research open and transparent does not only refer to the availability of the results as an Open Access publication, but also to the access to the research data used or collected. As in the case of secondary publication, repositories are available for this purpose that store research data in a structured and reusable manner. In a special way, questions of data protection and personal rights have to be taken into account here, far from the still valid requirements of (database) copyright. There are also often specific requirements for structure, format and accompanying data that belong to the actual research data. In this regard, it is advisable to contact the contact persons of the research data repositories directly, to consider any data management plans (e.g. for Horizon 2020 projects) on the part of the repositories or research funders at an early stage, and to clarify the availability period of the research data with the project participants in a legally secure manner. Many repositories also work with interfaces and tools that simplify storage.

Researchers in qualification phases may want to or have to publish in recognized journals. The reputation of a journal is often measured by impact and citation frequency: Journals with a wide reach are considered important. Many Open Access journals are well positioned with regard to such bibliometric criteria for scientific research.There is no general database or binding criteria for this. However, in the Scimago Journal Ranking, for example, it is possible to filter by OA journal and sort by SJR or H-index; the Directory of Open Access Journals also provides information on whether and how OA-compliant the journal in question is. As a general rule, OA journals are not inferior in quality to subscription journals.