User:Filippo Morsiani/Open access in Germany

Open Access in Germany is progressed by initiatives from research organisations, the Federal Government and the Länder.

A large number of institutional and discipline-specific repositories exist in Germany, which are maintained mostly by universities and research institutes. As of July 2015 OpenDOAR registers 172 open access institutional repositories. The German Initiative for Network Information (DINI) is supporting a national repository infrastructure. 

DOAJ indexes 354 German open access journals. These journals are hosted in part by open access journal platforms, in part by research institutions and learned societies. Important platforms that host open access journals are: Copernicus Publications, Digital Peer Publishing NRW, German Medical Science, and Living Reviews. 

History

The 2003 Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities has been initiated by the German Max-Planck-Society. Since its adoption the Berlin Declaration has been signed by 53 German Institutions, including the big research organizations and the German Rectors' Conference which represents 258 universities and other higher education institutions.

In 2013 a secondary publication right was amended into German Urheberrecht to support open access to research which gives scientists and researchers the legal right to self-archive their publications on the internet, even if they have agreed to transfer all exploitation rights to a publisher. The secondary publication right applies to results of mainly publicly funded research, 12 month after the first publication, cannot be waived, and the author’s version is self-archived.

Potential barriers

According to the UNESCO Global Open Access Portal there are several barriers to open access in Germany:

• Awareness of open access amongst individual researches could be stronger.
• Many, but not all universities have an open access policy.
• Possible misunderstanding on issues of copyright and intellectual property.

International initiatives

The German research organisations are taking part in working groups on Open Access on an international level, e.g. the EUROHORCs working group on Open Access and Knowledge Exchange. 

National and institutional policies

The big research organisations and many institutions of higher education have open access policies. ROARMAP registers 22 open access policies. The Federal Ministry of Education and Research supports open access. It also provides information on open access on its website and plans to develop an open access strategy in the new legislative term.

The main research funding body, the German Research Foundation (DFG), provides lump sums for covering publication costs including Open Access fees and also has a funding programme for publicising where universities can apply for funding in order to cover Open Access publication charges by university-based authors. From 2010 onward, the DFG financially supports so-called Alliance Licenses only under the condition that the publishers whose journals are licensed permit German authors and their institutions to deposit their articles from the licensed journals in open access repositories. The DFG has also tied open access to its funding policy: Recipients of DFG-Funding are expected to make their research results to be published and to be made available, where possible, digitally and on the internet on an open access basis.

In 2016 the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), which also is a major funder of research, which requires that all scientific articles from BMBF funded projects should be published in an open access journal or made available in an open access repository after an embargo period. When publishing the open access policy the Federal Research Minister Professor Johanna Wanka said: “It is important to me that the results of research funded with tax money are available free of charge to the general public.”

Open access policies of research organisations

The major German research organisations work together in the Priority Initiative “Digital Information”. The goal of this initiative is to equip scientists and academics with the information and infrastructures best suited to facilitate their scientific work. One priority area of the initiative is open access. All four research organisations have open access policies.

• The Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, a research organisation focusing on health, security, communication, energy and the environment, requires deposit of research material in open access depositories within 12 months of publication.

• The Helmholtz Association, an association of 17 scientific-technical and biological-medical research centres that lead government research in science and the environment, has no strict open access mandate. The Helmholtz Association encourages gold open access, while green open access is promoted through institutional repositories of the individual Helmholtz Centres.

• The Leibniz Association, an association of independent research organisations established to promote science and research cooperation with each other and state and commercial research institutes, has no open access mandate, though green open access and gold open access is promoted through the Leibniz repository.

• The Max Planck Society, the major independent scientific research organisation in Germany is demonstrating a sustained commitment to open access publishing. The Max Planck Society mandates institutional self-archiving of research output on the eDoc server and publications by its researchers in open access journals within 12 months.

Open access tools

The German open access community has developed a range of tools and services—many of them with initial funding from the German Research Foundation through the DFG—access.net, a DINI certificate that sets standards and best practices for repository services, a network of open access repositories and services on top of repositories, and a collaboration of university presses. A registry of research data repositories has been recently launched. These national projects are linked to international activities through collaboration with COAR, Knowledge Exchange, OAPEN, DOAB and other initiatives.

Open educational resources

While there are sustained activities to encourage open access for scientific research in Germany, awareness of open educational resources is low and no funding is available. At a Bielefeld conference in 2011 stakeholders signed a declaration to disseminate the concept of open educational resources. Following the conference initiatives were launched, such as information provision to German teachers about open educational resources under Creative Commons. in 2013 the Wikimedia Foundation organised the first German open educational resources conference in Berlin. The Federal Government has since commissioned a study to investigate the potential benefits of open educational resources.

Sources

 This article incorporates text from a free content work. Licensed under CC-BY-SA IGO 3.0 (license statement/permission). Text taken from Global Open Access Portal​, UNESCO. UNESCO.

Category:Open access by country Category:Germany Category:Academic publishing Category:Open access (publishing) Category:Access to Knowledge movement