What exactly is Open Access?
Open Access is generally referred to as free access to scientific literature on the internet. This formulation refers to the so-called Budapest Declaration of 2002, which defines Open Access as follows:
"By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited."
[Declaration by Budapest Open Access Initiative, 2002]
In their joint guidelines (as of May 2023) on the subject of OA, the federal and state governments have also once again emphasized the importance of the digital transformation and the structures that need to be created as a result.
The sentence "Free science is science which publishes its results." is the main point of the guidelines of the federal and state governments.
With this in mind, we as a library team support you in this process with existing and future services and infrastructure.
There are various initiatives and projects that deal in depth with this topic, including:
On the respective homepages of the projects and institutions, there are various guides, advice, videos and overviews that give you a clear understanding of the topic of Open Access.
Open Science
As a member institute of the Leibniz Association, it is also important for us to make our contribution on the way to an open scientific culture. We support this by placing the topic of open access at the forefront of our work as a library. The Leibniz Open Science Policy serves as our guiding principle. You can find more detailed information on this topic on the Leibniz Association's homepage (Leibniz Association - Open Science).