Our service tip for October
Publishing open access
Did you know, that for more than 30% of academic papers researchers of the University of Bayreuth wrote last year, a free online version is available?
This service tip will tell you how to find freely available academic papers very quickly online and how to make your own articles available.
Open access stands for free access to academic publications. Papers and other writings which have been published open access are freely accessible on the internet. Users may read, download, copy, distribute and print them without any further costs. The exploitation rights remain with the author(s).
This service tip will tell you how to find freely available academic papers very quickly online and how to make your own articles available.
Open access stands for free access to academic publications. Papers and other writings which have been published open access are freely accessible on the internet. Users may read, download, copy, distribute and print them without any further costs. The exploitation rights remain with the author(s).
The two most important options to make articles freely accessible on the internet are:
- Publishing an article in an open access journal
Open access journals are journals which are no longer financed by subscription fees but by charging fees for single articles (so called APC = article processing charges). These fees have to be paid by the authors or their institution. This is also called gold open access. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) gives an overview of these journals.
The University of Bayreuth established a publishing fund supported by the DFG to cover article processing charges up to 2000 Euro. For further information on eligibility conditions, see our open access website.
- Providing articles or previous versions on an institutional or specialised repository in addition to the publication in a journal
Authors can publish their articles on a repository of their choice, if it has been published in an open access journal. If that is not the case, most publishers grant their authors certain rights for a secondary publication. The directory SHERPA RoMEO lists the current conditions for the respective journals.
The University of Bayreuth provides the institutional repository EPub Bayreuth EPub Bayreuth for its members. There are also well-established specialised repositories for several subjects (e. g. for physics, mathematics, computer sciences and others ArXiv.org or for biology BioRxiv. For further information and contacts at Bayreuth University Library see our website on secondary publication of articles .
How can open access articles be found?
- Unpaywall is a free add-on that indicates if there is an online open access version, provided that the article in question has a DOI. This add-on is available for Firefox and Google Chrome.
- The open access button checks if there is a freely accessible version of an article (based on the DOI) and forwards an inquiry to the author if requested. This web application is also available as an add-on for Google Chrome. A one-time registration with an email address is necessary.