Open access for first publications (golden way)

'Golden way' refers to the primary publication of a scientific text in an open access journal. Depending on the journal, publication is either free of charge or through payment of a publication fee. This fee can be covered by the University of Münster's publication fund if certain conditions are met. For ten journals from high energy physics, the fees are covered by the SCOAP3 consortium.

As in the conventional publication cycle, the OA contribution is also checked for quality and relevance – usually through peer reviewing. As a rule, a publication contract is concluded with the publisher, which specifies which rights of use the authors grant to the publisher and which terms of use apply to the freely accessible documents.

Lists of open access journals and books

The most important quality-assessed open access journals for various disciplines are listed in the DOAJ, the Directory of Open Access Journals.
There are two services offered by German libraries for getting an overview of open access journals. B!SON is a recommendation service: the planned title, abstract, and bibliography of your article are analysed using semantic and bibliometric methods to present you with a list of journals that might fit thematically. The oa.finder takes a different perspective: it lists which journals have gold open access status, their impact factor, whether they charge publication fees, and whether there is an agreement or publication fund at your institution that covers the costs. The journals can also be filtered thematically by subject area and keywords.

Monographs are now also published by OA publishers. The DOAB - Directory of Open Access Books - provides an overview of individual titles and publishers.

"Predatory Publishing"

In recent years, "Predatory Journals" and "Predatory Conference Organizers" have increased as negative concomitants of the scholarly publishing and communication system.

Predatory journals are journals that use aggressive advertising and a professional appearance to invite researchers to publish articles in exchange for a publication fee, but organize no or completely inadequate quality assurance measures.

Similar activities are pursued by "Predatory Conference Organizers", who organize dubious conferences and invite researchers to participate and attend these events.

Therefore, it is all the more important to choose the right journal for a publication or even to look closely at conferences to see if they are high-quality scientific events. On the following information websites you will find instructions on how to check the quality of journals and further information on the topic of "Predatory Journals" and "Predatory Conference Organizers":

Open access for secondary publications (green way)

The term 'green way' refers to the parallel or delayed open access publication of research results previously published in paid media. In the Anglo-American world in particular, the term 'self-archiving' is also used as a synonym for 'green way'.

Self-archiving refers to the secondary publication of articles on personal websites or on document servers. In the case of document servers, so-called repositories, a distinction is made between institutional repositories, which are operated by universities, for example, and disciplinary repositories, where publications are archived, listed and made accessible according to thematic aspects. The OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) currently lists over 2,600 repositories worldwide. At the University of Münster, the document server miami is available for self-archiving.

Many publishers now allow the parallel publication of publishing documents. This is often subject to certain conditions. The SHERPA/RoMEO list provides information on what publishers allow with regard to self-archiving of scientific publications.
Furthermore, articles published by authors of the University of Münster in a journal with an alliance or national license can also be published on miami. The exact conditions can be found in the handout on open access options in alliance and national licenses.
You are also welcome to contact us and we will check under which conditions we can publish your documents electronically on our document server miami.

If you publish articles in paid journals or books, be aware of your authorship rights when entering into contracts with publishers: get the right to deposit a digital copy of your work in an institutional repository in publishing contracts.
More information about authors' rights

In general, open access publications are protected by copyright in the same way as printed publications. If you also want to define terms of use for previously license-free publications, you can provide them with a license agreement. One example of licenses already in frequent use is the Creative Commons licenses.

Open access, closed access – and in between: hybrid

Conventional journals that are subscription-based, i.e., to which libraries or interested readers must subscribe, are referred to as "closed access journals" to distinguish them from open access journals.
However, since the editors of such journals have recognized that authors increasingly want to publish in open access or – e.g., due to the requirements of research funding agencies – have to do so, some journals now offer a "mixed model": so-called hybrid journals are still subscription-based, but individual articles can be "bought free" for an additional fee. Only the articles for which this additional fee has been paid are then freely available; the others remain behind the publisher's paywall and can only be read if subscription access is available.

Since publishers collect twice in this model called "double dipping," such journals are excluded from reimbursement through the university's publication fund. However, there are framework agreements with some publishers that also cover the costs of open access publications in hybrid journals.