#OAWeek2024: Welcome to Open Access Week at TU Hamburg

The international Open Access Week takes place every year at the end of October. Institutions around the world promote free access to scientific results. Open Access Week 2024 is an opportunity to join forces and raise awareness of the importance of collaborative control of knowledge sharing systems.

Photo of people sitting in an auditorium combined with a white open access lock in the middle.

Community over Commercialization

Last year’s motto is also the motto of this year’s Open Access Week. Because there is still a lot to do: our science thrives on the exchange of and access to scientific knowledge. However, financial reasons still exclude too many scientists worldwide from this. With the TUHH, we want to help change this. Here are some highlights of our work since Open Access Week 2023.

Grazing lights

Here’s an idea! Could a publisher use the subscription income for well-established journals to make these journals open access? Libraries would have the same expenses. Readers and authors pay nothing. Richard Gallagher (Annual Reviews) presented this “Subscribe to Open” idea last year at the TUHH. We now support this model with several publishers. Whether it pays off for publishers in the long term depends on institutions like us continuing to take out subscriptions and not becoming free riders.
Are we enough? How can a young but increasingly important journal in the field be sustainably financed so that there are no costs for reading and publishing? The library would have liked to contribute to making this possible for Quantum (Open Journal for Quantum Science) together with other institutions. Prof. Kliesch from the Institute for Quantum Inspired and Quantum Optimization has also advocated this. Unfortunately, the consortium has received too few letters of intent.
The DEAL! For the major scientific publishers Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, access to all journals will be possible from 2024 and articles from the TUHH will be made open access. Most of the costs will be borne by the library. How high these will be depends on the number of TUHH publications.
Through the roof: The costs for the Publishing Read & Publish Agreement with AIP (American Institute of Physics) have increased significantly. An unexpectedly large number of publications from the TUHH after the agreement was signed have led to a doubling of the costs of our participation. We will have to drop out.
Price tags for the overview! A fee is charged for the publication of many, but by no means all, articles. Libraries document these payments to publishers transparently. We also provide information on every article paid for by the TUHH: OpenAPC
Instead of free access: Many fee-based journals offer an open access option for an additional fee for an article. As a free Open Access alternative, you have the option of a secondary publication on TUHH Open Research.

Accompany us us through the week

At the TUHH, we are participating in Open Access Week 2024 with various blog posts and an advisory service on all aspects of open access publishing. Follow our blog #oaweek2024 and be inspired to think and discuss this week: How do you want to publish in the future and what support would you like for this?

International Open Access Week: Community over Commercialization. October 21-27, 2024. #OAWeek

We look forward to your questions!

We will be happy to advise you on Open Access

You can reach the Open Access team via mail openaccess@tuhh.de.

Please also feel free to take part in our Open Access consultation hours via Zoom (identification code: 190591) if you have questions regarding Open Access (every Friday from 10:00 am to 10:30 am).