#1 Introduction to Open Access

Welcome to the 1st part of our video series on Open Access. In this introduction we want to present the basics: What does Open Access mean? And what benefits does it have? What options do authors have? What do research funders say on open access? We, that‘s the Open Access team at TU Berlin, located at the University Library. Please find contact details at the end of the presentation or in the video description below. The idea behind open access is simple: Publicly funded research should be available to and usable by the public. By public we mean both the research community and the general public.

00:52 - Research should be freely available – online – immediately. With a mere condition that the creator attributed correctly. Which, of course, is just sound and good research practice. Open Access is a global development and it focusses on two aspects: First of all, research should be free to read – for stakeholders in the higher education sector, in politics and society, for journalists etc. Second and no less important, research should be free to use – in teaching and further research, social media, by journalists etc.

01:36 - Think of “free” as in ‘free speech’, not as in ‘free beer’. So it‘s not only about costs, it‘s about user rights. As researcher you benefit from open access on two levels: In your role as author with open access you retain rights for your own publications. In general open access publications are findable more easily via all kind of search services. Also, scientific studies have shown that the citation frequency increases if an article is available open access.

02:15 - In your role as reader your benefit to is quite obvious: With free access to scholarly literature you probably save a lot of time. No more VPN connection needed to access institutionally subscribed content. No more emailing authors to get a private copy. And in some cases free-of-cost access might not be enough. You might want to use content in own publications or teaching. With open access, ideally there‘s no more tedious permission requests to publishers. There are different paths to choose when you want to publish your research open access. You could either publish under Open Access conditions, what we like to call the “Gold Road”. You could also publish rather traditionally, under closed access conditions with the publisher, but additionally self-archive your manuscript on an open access repository. Libraries and sometimes also publishers call this path the “Green Road” to Open Access. Let’s look at the details.

03:25 - With “gold” open access your article or book will be available open access via the publisher. Access to the peer-reviewed, published version will be free immediately, online, worldwide and free of cost. Usually content is published with an open or free license. That results in certain user rights to copy, share and re-distribute the content. With the “Green Road” you have to put a little more effort into open access: When your article is hidden behind a paywall you can usually upload a version of your article in a - so called - repository.

04:05 - But watch out: some publishers have restrictions on self-archiving. You might only be able to use the submitted or accepted manuscript. Plus sometimes you have to respect an embargo period. That means you have to wait usually for 12 months. Researchers of TU Berlin should be aware of the institutional open access policy that was adopted by the Academic Senate in December 2017. The open access policy lists 8 recommendations.

04:39 - And today we will look at the 3 most important ones: In general, TU Berlin recommends Open Access and to publish under a free license, preferably with an open access compliant CC-BY license attached. This recommendation refers to the “Gold Road”, with open access via the publisher. If funding criteria are met Open Access fees can be financed via the central publication fund. Secondly, TU Berlin calls on members of the university to use their right to self-archive, i.e. to upload an open access version to a repository. Whenever you are unsure about publishers‘ conditions the Open Access team is happy to assist.

05:28 - A third recommendation, we want to highlight today, is touching the type of rights you transfer as author. The university encourages you to transfer non-exclusive rights to publishers and thus retains rights for your own re-use. Let’s have a look at what research funders take stands on open access. If you are part of an EU funded project you have to respect the open access mandate. In other words, since 2013 you must make your research available open access. And there might be sanctions if you don‘t comply. If you are part of a project funded by the Federal Ministry for Research and Education (BMBF) or the German Research Foundation (DFG) the guidelines are less strict. You should publish open access, but it‘s not mandatory. The open access strategy for the state of Berlin which was adopted in 2015. It takes a similar approach: Researchers at Berlin higher education institutions should publish Open Access, but there are no sanctions, if you don’t comply.

06:45 - To conclude we want to have a closer look of how much of TU Berlin’s research is freely available at the moment. Our own data analyses have shown a steady increase of open access articles for the past years. And we have reached about 50%. Approximately 2 out of 5 journal articles published by Berlin-based researchers in 2018 are open access. For TU Berlin it’s as much as 1 out of 2 journal articles. The open access strategy for the state of Berlin aims at an open access share of 60% by 2020.

07:28 - And that means at least 3 out of 5 journal articles published in 2020 should be available open access. And the state of Berlin puts a lot of effort and money in achieving this goal. So how can you contribute to raise the overall Open Acces share? If you have any question on Open Access please don‘t hesitate to contact us via mail or phone. Thanks for watching this first introduction. In further videos we will get into details for open access financing, both for journals and books and present special Open Access agreements with publishers that are currently in place for TU Berlin.

08:13 - We will also take a closer look at preprints and self-archiving. .