Open Access Basics

“Article Processing Charges (APCs) are publication fees that authors pay to journals for publishing their articles in open access. Not all OA journals charge APCs. This fee model is intended to reflect the time and effort spent by publishers on quality assurance, processing and publication of the publications. “Processing charges” also exist in the area of OA monographs (see BPC).

arXiv is a preprint document server – operated by Cornell University – for physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics.

“Book Processing Charges” (BPC) are publication fees that authors pay to publishers for the open access publication of books (monograph or edited volume). There are also “Book Chapter Processing Charges” (BCPC).

Closed access means that scientific information (e.g. in articles) can only be viewed by paying a fee. These costs are taken over by university libraries or also the interested readers. By choosing closed access, authors waive their own exclusive rights of use and exploitation. From now on, these rights are held by the publisher. Authors can therefore no longer decide on the further use of their own research results.

The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) is a non-profit organisation that provides advice and guidance on dealing with ethical issues in scientific publishing.

The Corresponding Author is the main contact person for questions regarding the article during and after the publication process. In the case of funding by the TU Library, a key criterion is that the Corresponding Author identifies him/herself in accordance with the TU Affiliation Policy and, in the case of an affiliation with multiple institutions, that the TUHH is named first.

Creative Commons licenses (CC licenses) are standard licenses that make it relatively easy to grant interested parties rights to use the respective works. Through these licenses, free works are created. The license itself functions according to the modular principle. The recommendation for Open Access via the tub. is currently the standard CC BY 4.0 (Attribution). For more on CC licenses, see here.

Under the project name DEAL-Konsortium, the HRK is negotiating Germany-wide transformation agreements with the major STEM journal publishers (Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley) on behalf of the Alliance of Science Organizations. Contracts could be concluded with the publisher Wiley in 2019 as well as with SpringerNature in early 2020. The DEAL contract allows TUHH members to publish TU Hamburg publications in the journals of these publishers in open access and to access the journal offerings of both publishers for reading. Since 2021, the DEAL contract with SpringerNature also includes the renowned Nature Research journals for the first time.

The DOAB (Directory of Open Access Books) is a cross-disciplinary directory of scholarly e-books that are and have been published with an open access license. DOAB is also included as a resource in our tub.find catalog.

The DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) can be used to search quality-checked open access journals and their articles. DOAJ is also included as a resource in our tub.find catalog.

The DOI (Digital Object Identifier) is an alphanumeric permanent identifier of a publication and serves to identify it unambiguously in the network and to make it citable. Consisting of two parts, it is made up of the publisher number and a character string that identifies the individual digital object.

The term ‘‘double dipping’’ has a negative connotation. It refers to the hybrid journal business model (see also Hybrid Journal), in which, among other things, library budgets are charged multiple times. First, because fees are taken for access to a journal (subscription fees), and second, because publication fees (see APC) are taken for articles that can thus appear open access via hybrid journals.

The embargo period is a possible publisher requirement for secondary publication as Open Access. This describes the period of time that authors must wait before their article may be made available on an institutional repository, for example. The length of the embargo period depends on the publisher and the journal in question. It can range from 6 to 24 months. The specifications of the individual publishers can be found via the project SHERPA/RoMEO.

see Golden Path

The Golden Path stands for the first publication of a scientific article in a pure Open Access journal. These undergo the same quality assurance processes as conventional works, e.g. in the form of peer review or editorial review. Pure open access journals are also characterized by the fact that the article is immediately freely available and thus immediately usable by everyone. For the publication costs incurred, which usually have to be paid by the author, funding can be applied for under certain conditions via the Publication Fund of the tub.

The Green Way is the second publication as Open Access. This means making previously published papers available in repositories such as TUHH Open Research (TORE). There are possible publisher requirements to consider for second publication. Most scientific publishers allow delayed publication of the postprint or preprint on a repository of the own institution. Detailed information on the specifications of individual publishers is provided by the project SHERPA/RoMEO.

Hybrid open access is a way of making individual articles published in subscription journals additionally freely available in return for a publication charge (APC).

The term “hybrid journal” refers to subscription journals in which individual articles can be published as Open Access in return for payment. The journal consists of closed and open access articles and is therefore not a pure open access journal. This model is not without controversy, as it results in double payment of subscription and publication fees to publishers.

The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) is an association of publishers who have committed themselves to various quality criteria for publishing in open access. These include, for example, a rigorous review process. The list of member publishers is a quality indicator for the trustworthiness of a journal.

The Open Access Monitor was developed by the Central Library of the Research Center Jülich as part of a project and with funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The OAM records the publication volume of German academic institutions in scientific journals, which can then be used to perform analyses of subscription and publication output.

Opt-out means that authors decide against Open Access and thus transfer exclusive rights to publishers. The further use of their own work is restricted by this decision. An article is therefore no longer visible without restriction to all interested parties worldwide. Institutions must pay individually for the article in question or subscribe to the journal in question so that relatives can access these research results (see also closed access). The choice of Ops-out also does not lead to a cost reduction for TUHH.

ORCID stands for “Open Researcher & Contributor iD”. With this iD, scientists can be clearly linked to their research activities and results, even if they have the same name or different spellings. The ORCID iD is used internationally by publishers and organizations in the scientific field and is already integrated in large systems such as Web of Science, CrossRef or Scopus as well as in many journals. The ORCID id can be linked to the contact database of the TUHH as well as to the publications in TORE.

A paywall is a payment barrier or access barrier for online content. Access to this content is subject to a fee, which means that users can only access these publishing offerings after paying a fee or taking out a subscription.

The peer review process serves to ensure the quality of a scientific paper before it is published. An independent reviewer from the same field evaluates the work. For more information see our blog Wissenschaftliches Arbeiten.

This is a scientific text that has already gone through the review process and has been accepted for publication in a journal. A distinction can be made between two forms of postprint: a postprint that is completely identical to the publisher’s publication in terms of both content and form (e.g. layout), and a postprint that is identical in terms of content but has formal deviations.

Predatory publishing or Predatory Journals, differ from serious journals, e.g., in the fact that authors are to be led to the paid submission of manuscripts via intrusive spam mails. During the solicitation, short (mostly unrealistic) peer review processes are advertised, which do not take place in the end. On the pages of the respective providers, there are inconsistencies such as contact options via e-mail addresses that do not look very professional, texts that are copied together and contain typing and printing errors, and little transparency regarding publication procedures and contract information. The web service Think – Check – Submit offers good assistance in selecting the “right” magazine.

In contrast to the postprint, the preprint is all versions of a scientific publication that were written before the peer review process. These have therefore not yet gone through the peer review process.

A repository is a document server for publishing and archiving electronic publications. Uploaded documents are given a unique identifier (e.g. DOI) so that they can be found and cited. TUHH’s repository is TUHH Open Research (TORE).

see Green Way

Many publishers and journals allow additional publication by the authors as Open Access under certain conditions. The so-called SHERPA/Romeo list is intended to help make the publishers’ standard conditions for open access publications more transparent for authors. Information such as possible embargo periods, licensing conditions or article versions can be found here.

Think – Check – Submit is a website that offers a clear checklist for assessing the trustworthiness of journals and conferences. Because quality assurance is an essential part of science, authors can use Think – Check – Submit to check the journal against various criteria before submitting an article. For conferences, Think – Check – Attend can be used.

TUHH Open Research (TORE) is the repository for open access publications (formerly tub.dok) and research data as well as the research information system of the Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH). Here, freely available publications by members of the TUHH are made available in full text. The spectrum includes journal articles, conference papers and reports as well as dissertations written at the TUHH.