Open Access options

Publishing using Open Access publishers

With Gold Open Access, scientific publications are initially published on the Internet via an Open Access publisher or repository. Publishers often require an article processing charge (APC) for this.

The Open Access publication fund initiated by the German Research Foundation (DFG) enables us in certain circumstances to cover a pro rata basis of the publication charges for your Open Access publication.

Contracts negotiated with publishers can offer discounts on publication in selected journals.

Hybrid journals

In hybrid journals, commercial publishers allow authors to make individual articles Open Access in subscription journals for payment of a fee.

The financing structure of this hybrid publication process is controversial and is explicitly not funded by the DFG. Articles in these journals do not meet the funding guidelines of the Open Access publication fund.

Based on umbrella agreements, we have negotiated discounts for Open Access publication and/or concluded transformative agreements with some publishers, covering both read access and the option to publish Open Access.

Self-archiving on a document server (parallel publication)

Green Open Access is the term for secondary publication of academic texts on an institution or subject-specific publication server (repository).

The institutional repository of the University of Tübingen is the publication system. Here you can publish various types of University of Tübingen publications free of charge. The content can be searched by various search engines such as Google, Google Scholar, OpenAire, etc.

A list of the publishers who permit secondary or parallel publication can be found in the SHERPA/RoMEO database, along with details of the kind of secondary or parallel publication they permit.

Secondary exploitation rights

The right to secondary exploitation came into effect on January 1, 2014. It permits the secondary publication of texts that have been at least 50% funded by public means.

Unofficial translation:

“The copyright holder of a scientific article which has been produced in the context of a research activity that is at least 50% publicly funded and which has been published in a collection that appears periodically at least twice a year shall, even if they have granted the publisher or editor an exclusive right of use, have the right to make the article available to the public in the accepted manuscript version twelve months after the initial publication, provided that this does not serve any commercial purpose. The source of the initial publication is to be acknowledged. Any agreement contrary to this and to the detriment of the author is invalid.”

To read the full text of the law (in German) ...

(also sponsored or Platinum Open Access)

Financing under consortium or community treaties – no ‘per article’ charges for authors

The concept of Fair Open Access arose out of the fundamental idea of free access to scientific research – formed into the Fair Open Access Alliance. This formulated the following guidelines:

• The journal must have a transparent ownership structure, be verified by and responsive to the scientific community.
• Article authors grant the journal a one-off right of use.
• All articles are published in Open Access and an explicit Open Access license is used.
• Submission and publication has no connection to payment of a fee by the copyright holder or the institution they are employed by, or to membership of an institution or association.
• The fees paid to the publisher for the journal are low, transparent and in proportion to the work done.

Specialist bodies or research institutes and universities bear the costs through membership or a form of sponsorship and authors can publish free of any publication costs.

Examples of this include the international preprint servers arXiv and BioRxiv, as well as the Open Library of Humanities platform.