Volume 54 (2007), Edition 4-5

Unrestricted access to scientific publication is a decisive prerequisite for scientific research. In view of the trend toward concentration in the publishing sector and of inflation, especially in journal publishing, the open access movement...

The publication culture of the hermeneutically driven social sciences and humanities (SSH) differs significantly from that of the hard sciences with respect both to publication formats and to the relationship between carrier formats to content. An...

Publications in open access media can be used free of charge but nevertheless need to be financed. The scholars, institutions and libraries, as well as research funders, who contribute to making this possible, thus now find themselves in a new...

The so-called »green« road is the simplest method of implementing open access. Also known as »self-archiving«, this term applies to ancillary publishing of scientific publications in repositories set up by the authors themselves to make...

Since 1999 the German Initiative for Network Information (DINI) - in particular via the Committee for Electronic Publishing - has been endeavoring to advance the set-up of document servers in Germany, to establish examples of best practice, and to...

Institutional repositories are a fundamental instrument for the implementation of open access using either the green road or the golden road. This article provides an overview of the software systems currently being used in Germany to operate...

In many disciplines there has been no question of the value and usefulness of primary data been for some time - though for different reasons ranging from good scientific practice, reusefulness,to data driven science. Along with a discussion of open...

The open access agenda of the Max Planck Society, initiator of the Berlin Declaration, envisions the support of both the green way and the golden way to open access. For the implementation of the green way the Max Planck Society through its newly...

Open access is an important topic at universities in Germany: for the scientists as producers of scientific publications, for the university administration as financial backers, and for libraries as information suppliers. This article gives an...

The German Research Foundation (DFG), Germany's largest organisation for the promotion of research, is a strong advocate for free-of-charge access to the results of scientific research. The political support of open access flanks projects which...

Within the framework of sustainable operational planning, a large portion of open access activities depends upon decentralized open digital storage sites in libraries and other types of institutional infrastructures. While the content is maintained...

Increased visibility of documents is regarded as one of the advantages of open access publication. Coupled with this is the assumption that, in comparison to fee-based access, increased visibility will lead to an increase in usage of open access...

This article investigates the circumstances under which authors can benefit economically from using the Creative Commons license to make their works available for open access. The methodology applies anthropological techniques that examine the...

Knowledge transfer is obviously a key factor for colleges and universities and is directly associated with the provision of scientific information. The traditional (paper-based) process of publication can significantly impair digital provision of...

The Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres was among the first to sign the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. In order to implement open access within research centers a pragmatic and...

Ever since the highly publicized launch of the first open access journals of the »Public Library of Science« and the publication of the »Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities« there has been growing...

German Medical Science (GMS) was established in 2003 by the Association of German Scientific Medical Societies (AWMF), DIMDI (German Institute of Medical Documentation and Information), and the ZB MED Köln (German National Library of Medicine in...

All of the activities for implementing the work and publishing strategies of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences have been subsumed under the acronym Telota (»The Electronic Life of the Academy«). This article outlines the origins of the...

Formal peer-reviewed publication of research results is seen as a necessity in science. But also, open access to these results is increasingly seen as a necessity. The two are sometimes seen as incompatible, but they are not. But we have to get away...