Open access
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 de ...
to scholarly communication in Germany has evolved rapidly since the early 2000s.
Publishers
Beilstein-Institut,
Copernicus Publications
Copernicus Publications (also: Copernicus GmbH) is a publisher of scientific literature based in Göttingen, Germany. Founded in 1994, Copernicus Publications currently publishes 28 peer-reviewed open access scientific journals and other publica ...
,
De Gruyter
Walter de Gruyter GmbH, known as De Gruyter (), is a German scholarly publishing house specializing in academic literature.
History
The roots of the company go back to 1749 when Frederick the Great granted the Königliche Realschule in Be ...
,
Knowledge Unlatched
Knowledge Unlatched (KU) is an Open Access service provider registered as a for-profit GmbH in Berlin, Germany, and owned by multinational commercial publishing company Wiley as of December 2021. It offers a crowdfunding model to support a varie ...
,
Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information,
ScienceOpen
ScienceOpen is a web-based platform, that hosts open access journals. It is freely accessible for readers, authors and publishers, and it generates its revenues via promotional services for publishers and authors' institutions. The organization i ...
,
Springer Nature
Springer Nature or the Springer Nature Group is a German-British academic publishing company created by the May 2015 merger of Springer Science+Business Media and Holtzbrinck Publishing Group's Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan, and Macm ...
, and belong to the international
Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association
The Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) is a non-profit trade association of open access journal and book publishers. Having started with an exclusive focus on open access journals, it has since expanded its activities to include ...
.
Policy
The legal basis for authors choosing open access publishing lies in Section 12 of the German (Copyright Act), which covers
Urheberrecht (authors' rights).
All major German research institutions have signed the 2003
, including the
Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities
The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (), abbreviated BBAW, is the official academic society for the natural sciences and humanities for the German states of Berlin and Brandenburg. Housed in three locations in and around Ber ...
,
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
The German Research Foundation ( ; DFG ) is a German research funding organization, which functions as a self-governing institution for the promotion of science and research in the Federal Republic of Germany. In 2019, the DFG had a funding bu ...
, ,
Fraunhofer Society
The Fraunhofer Society () is a German publicly-owned research organization with 76institutes spread throughout Germany, each focusing on different fields of applied science (as opposed to the Max Planck Society, which works primarily on Basic re ...
,
German Rectors' Conference
The German Rectors' Conference ( German: ''Hochschulrektorenkonferenz'' – HRK) is the voluntary association of state and state-recognised universities and other higher education institutions in Germany
Germany, officially the Federal Repu ...
, and
Max Planck Society
The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science (; abbreviated MPG) is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German research institutes. Founded in 1911 as the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, it was renamed to the M ...
.
"The
Federal Ministry of Education and Research released its open access strategy paper entitled "Open Access in Germany" on September 20, 2016, which contains a clear commitment to the principles of open access and open science.
Journals
Open access journals
Pulsus Group is a health informatics and digital marketing company and publisher of scientific, technical, and medical literature. It was formed in 1984, primarily to publish peer-reviewed medical journals. Pulsus published 98 hybrid and fu ...
can be found on digital platforms such as Copernicus Publications (headquartered in Göttingen), , , and
Living Reviews
''Living Reviews'' is an open access journal series, which publishes regularly updated peer-reviewed review articles in various fields of science. Its concept of "living" articles takes advantage of web-based electronic publishing and allows aut ...
.
Repositories

There are a number of collections of scholarship in Germany housed in digital
open access repositories
An open repository or open-access repository is a digital platform that holds research output and provides free, immediate and permanent access to research results for anyone to use, download and distribute. To facilitate open access such reposito ...
.
They contain journal articles, book chapters, data, and other research outputs that are
free to read. As of March 2018 some 161 institutions in Germany maintain repositories, according to the UK-based
Directory of Open Access Repositories
OpenDOAR: Directory of Open Access Repositories is a UK-based website that lists open access repositories (including academic ones). It is searchable by locale, content, and other measures. The service does not require complete repository detail ...
.
Listings of German repositories can be found in the Germany-based registries ''Bielefeld Academic Search Engine'' (BASE) and ''Deutsche Initiative für Netzwerkinformation'' (DINI), and in international registries ''Directory of Open Access Repositories'' (OpenDOAR), ''
Registry of Open Access Repositories
The Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) is a searchable international database indexing the creation, location and growth of open access institutional repositories and their contents. ROAR was created by EPrints at University of Southa ...
'' (ROAR), and
Open Archives Initiative
The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) was an informal organization, in the circle around the colleagues Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze, Michael L. Nelson and Simeon Warner, to develop and apply technical interoperability standards for archives t ...
's ''OAI-PMH Registered Data Providers''.
Experts consider BASE the most comprehensive registry for Germany.
In 2012, German repositories with the highest number of digital assets were
Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt's elib (46,136 items);
ZBW – Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft's
EconStor
EconStor is a disciplinary repository for Economics and Business Studies which offers research literature in Open Access
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications ar ...
(290,000 items); German Medical Science (41,753 items);
Universität Bielefeld
Bielefeld University () is a public university in Bielefeld, Germany. Founded in 1969, it is one of the country's newer universities, and considers itself a "reform" university, following a different style of organization and teaching than the e ...
's PUB (32,695 items); and
Alfred-Wegener-Institut's ePIC (29,480 items).
"Most of Germany's open access repositories can be found in the most heavily populated
Länder
(singular ) or (singular ) is the name for (federal) states in two German-speaking countries. It may more specifically refer to:
* States of Austria, the nine federal subdivisions of Austria
* States of Germany
The Federal Republic of Ge ...
: North Rhine-Westphalia (27), Baden-Württemberg (28) and Bavaria (22)."
The upcoming 2019 "International Conference on Open Repositories" will be held in Hamburg.
Conferences and outreach
Since the
initial Berlin conference in 2003, follow-up conferences occur every year, often in Germany.
"Open-Access-Tage" (Open Access Days) have occurred annually since 2007 in various German-speaking locales, including Berlin, Dresden, Göttingen, Hamburg, Köln, Konstanz, Munich, Regensburg. The 2018 event will be held in Graz, Austria.
In 2007 several German institutions launched the general information website, "Open-access.net". The in 2008 initiated an effort to expand open access in order to "exhaust the potential of
digital publishing
Electronic publishing (also referred to as e-publishing, digital publishing, or online publishing) includes the digital publication of e-books, digital magazines, and the development of digital libraries and catalogues. It also includes the ed ...
."
Bielefeld University Library hosts the "Transparent Infrastructure for Article Charges" project, which covers
article processing charges
An article processing charge (APC), also known as a publication fee, is a fee which is sometimes charged to authors. Most commonly, it is involved in making an academic work available as open access (OA), in either a full OA journal or in a hybri ...
for publications of Germany and elsewhere. The project began around 2014.
Timeline
Key events in the development of open access in Germany include the following:
* 2001
** 16 March:
German Wikipedia
The German Wikipedia () is the German-language edition of Wikipedia, a free and publicly editable online encyclopedia.
Founded on 16 March 2001, it is the second-oldest Wikipedia edition (after the English Wikipedia). It has articles, ma ...
, a German-language
open educational resource, begins publication.
* 2003
** Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities issued.
* 2004
** Bielefeld Academic Search Engine launched.
** (Coalition for Action "Copyright for Education and Research") formed.
* 2005
** Bielefeld University begins its
open access policy encouraging deposits in its institutional repository.
* 2006
** Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft adopts open access policy for its grantees.
* 2007
** Open-access.net launched.
** "Open-Access-Tage" (Open Access Days) begin.
* 2008
** Allianz der Wissenschaftsorganisationen's Schwerpunktinitiative "Digitale Information" (Priority Initiative "Digital Information") begins.
* 2010
**
Confederation of Open Access Repositories headquartered in Göttingen.
[ (+ vi]
Google Books
* 2011
** Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft begins "to support centrally funded
publication fees through its 'Open-Access Publishing' programme."
* 2012
** Deutsche Initiative für Netzwerkinformation (DINI) begins.
* 2013
**
Registry of Research Data Repositories
The Registry of Research Data Repositories (re3data.org) is an open science tool that offers researchers, funding organizations, libraries, and publishers an overview of existing international data library, repositories for research data.
Backg ...
headquartered in Germany.
* 2014
** "Transparent Infrastructure for Article Charges" project begins (approximate date).
* 2015
** Berlin-based
Springer Nature
Springer Nature or the Springer Nature Group is a German-British academic publishing company created by the May 2015 merger of Springer Science+Business Media and Holtzbrinck Publishing Group's Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan, and Macm ...
, "the world’s second largest
academic publisher
Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally publi ...
," in business. As of 2018 "open-access journals generate roughly 10 per cent of Springer Nature’s research revenues."
See also
*
Internet in Germany
The prevalent means of connecting to the Internet in Germany is DSL, introduced by Deutsche Telekom in 1999. Other technologies such as Cable, FTTH and FTTB (fiber), Satellite, UMTS/HSDPA ( mobile) and LTE are available as alternatives.
DSL
In ...
*
Education in Germany
Education in Germany is primarily the responsibility of individual German States of Germany, states (), with the federal government only playing a minor role.
While kindergarten (nursery school) is optional, formal education is compulsory for a ...
*
Media of Germany
*
Copyright law of Germany
*
List of libraries in Germany
This is a list of libraries in the Federal Republic of Germany. There is a much more extensive list available on the German Wikipedia. There are about 6,313 public libraries in Germany.
National Libraries
* German National Library (''Deutsche ...
*
Science and technology in Germany
Science and technology in Germany has a long and illustrious history, and research and development efforts form an integral part of Economy of Germany, the country's economy. Germany has been the home of some of the most prominent researchers i ...
*
Open access in other countries
References
Further reading
*
*
*
*
2013 version)
*
*
*
External links
*
*
*
*
*
*
{{Germany topics
Academia in Germany
Communications in Germany
Germany
Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...
Science and technology in Germany