The Role of Open Access in the Emergence of the Blue Engineering Seminars, the First Course by Students for Students at the Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH).
Guest article by Gerrit Weiser and Robinson Perić
Done: The hard-earned research results have been accepted as an article. Finally, everyone can read and discuss it. Or not? The article has been accepted by a journal that can only be read by those who have a subscription to it. Paywall is what we call it. The journal is good, the article is good, but how can colleagues without access now read it anyway? One possibility is the self-archiving on an institutional repository.
How exactly the whole process works and what needs to be taken into account in the case of self-archiving is a recurring topic in the daily consulting work of the Open Access Team. The following illustration shows the resulting conversation between the Open Access Team and a scientist:
Librarian: You have several options in this case. On the one hand, Elsevier offers fully open access journals. Here, your article is immediately freely available worldwide. You can apply for funding for the Article Processing Charges through our Publishing Fund.
Scientist: Unfortunately, my journal is not a fully open access journal. Nevertheless, is there a way to make the article freely accessible?
Librarian: Absolutely! You can secondary publish it through our repository.
Scientist: That sounds interesting. Is there anything to keep in mind?
Librarian: Yes, each publisher has certain conditions for self-archiving. The best thing for us to do is to take a look at your journal via Sherpa/Romeo. Here you can see what conditions have to be followed.
Scientist: I hadn’t even heard of that. Thanks a lot. It says that I can upload the accepted version to an institutional repository with the license CC-BY-NC-ND after an embargo of 24 months. What exactly is meant by “accepted version”?
Librarian: This is the version accepted for publication. Often it is also called “Accepted Manuscript”. It contains all changes and adjustments after the peer review. So in terms of content, it is identical to the later publication. What is missing is the publisher’s layout, which would be the “Published Version” or “Version of Record”, you are usually not allowed to use this.
Scientist: All right and how do I continue now?
Librarian: You can use TUHH Open Resesearch – we usually say TORE – to make your article freely available to anyone interested.
Scientist: I’ve heard of TORE before. *thinking*
Librarian: This is the research information system and repository at TUHH. Here you can upload your research results. The benefit is that your documents are permanently provided with a stable link and a unique, permanent identifier.
Scientists: And how exactly do I upload the article to TORE? Can I do that myself?
Librarian: Under the menu point “Publish” you can enter all metadata like title, authors, journal, DOI. It is important that you select the correct license. Then upload your document and set the embargo period in “Access Settings”.
Scientist: After the embargo is over, will the PDF be unlocked automatically?
Librarian: Exactly! At first, only the metadata will be available. Once the embargo expires, the PDF will be available to everyone worldwide. Until then, however, there is a “Request a Copy” button that colleagues can use to request the article from you.
Scientist: That sounds great! Thanks for the infomation.
Librarian: And don’t worry, the library will do a preliminary copyright check before publishing.
Scientists: What if I want to read an article myself and there is a paywall? Is there any way to get access?
Librarian: Unfortunately, we do not offer access to Elsevier journals at the moment. There are currently plans for a nationwide negotiation. But you can search for open access versions and install, for example, various browser plug-ins such as “Unpaywall” or the “Open Access Button“. If there is a freely available version of the article, they will forward you directly.
Scientist: And if there is no secondary publication of the article yet?
Librarian: Then you can contact our interlibrary loan. Our colleagues can usually get the article for you this way. Otherwise, there are also express delivery services that we can use to get the article for you.
Scientist: Thank you very much. Now all questions are clarified for me!
Librarian: I’m glad to hear that! You can always contact us at openaccess@tuhh.de or come to our virtual consultation hours via Zoom (identification code: 347349) on Fridays from 10:00 – 10:30.
Work created with Scenes™ by SAP AppHaus (https://apphaus.sap.com/scenes) 
Since March 2022, the University Library (tub.) has offered an open, virtual consultation hour on Open Access every Friday from 10:00 to 10:30. This is also the case during this Open Access Week 2022 – bring your questions on Friday, we will be happy to advise you on publishing in Open Access.
Contribution from Axel Dürkop und Florian Hagen
During the project period from 2019 to 2021, the Modern Publishing project bundled many years of experience of the Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH) and the Hamburg State and University Library (SUB) as part of the Hamburg Open Science (HOS) initiative. The goal: The development of a socio-technical system for single source publishing, i.e. for the generation of different output formats from one source format. This was based on open source solutions such as GitLab and Open Journal Systems (OJS) to enable an open alternative approach to publishing scientific results compared to commercial and proprietary publishing offerings.
Continue readingA contribution by Axel Dürkop and Axel Dürkop
One of the most important sources of information on the subject of climate is the UN’s IPCC reports. These are published approximately every five years. The Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was published in 2021 and 2022 in various volumes, unfortunately in the form of PDF files. This makes it difficult for people and machines to read, as well as to use them as widely as possible. The fact that parts of the reports are gradually being supplied in HTML format is encouraging.
Continue readingEvery year, the international Open Access Week takes place at the end of October. Institutions around the world promote free access to scientific results. Open Access stands for worldwide free access to literature, free of charge, reusable and without technical or legal barriers.
The motto of this year’s Open Access Week is “Open for Climate Justice” – because addressing the climate crisis requires the rapid exchange of knowledge across geographic, economic, and disciplinary boundaries.
Continue readingIn April 2019, the tub. launched the HOOU project (Hamburg Open Online University) tub.torials. The goal: to contribute a small part to more exchange on and about openness in science, research and teaching. The term „tub.torials“ is composed of the abbreviation of the University Library of the Hamburg University of Technology (tub.) and the term „tutorials“ (a kind of instruction manual that explains topics, processes and functions in various forms such as text, film or other formats). Part of the project was a blog offering that will continue to provide regular contributions from the entire life cycle of scientific communication after the project ends in December 2020.
Various open educational materials have been shared here over the past three calendar years. These include small collections of tips (e.g. tips for the start of the semester) as well as insights into ideas, experiences, events attended and workflows in everyday work via individual contributions (e.g. to Digitaltag 2021 and stARTcamp 2021) as well as formats such as monthly notes.
On the other hand, first steps with open applications (among others an introduction to Zotero, video recording with OBS or video recording with Shotcut) and insights into – from the tub. – offered events such as the bachelor seminar „Scientific Work“ were shared. The latter was often the inspiration for educational materials such as the Open Science Umbrella or a questionnaire to examine one’s own writing habits.
Looking back, the #Notizschreibwochen2020 series of articles was particularly exciting, in which guest authors from different areas of teaching, learning, science, and research shared their own methods and approaches to note-taking. Also very enriching: the many individual impressions and perspectives of students on topics such as the first online semester at the university or the topics of digitization and sustainability.
One of the highlights of 2021 will certainly be the Open Access publication „More than 77 tips for scientific work“, for which it was possible to build on experiences of the HOS project (Hamburg Open Science) Modern Publishing with applications such as GitLab and pandoc for the technical implementation.
What most of the publications on tub.torials have in common is mutual inspiration. Whether it’s guest posts with new perspectives on a topic, working together on texts, or exchanging ideas on publications. Whether it’s exchanging ideas and feedback via the comment function, at digital and analog events, by e-mail or via social media, the open interaction between us (and hopefully externally as well) always sparks new ideas. And so it is also a wish and goal of tub. in the future to offer an opportunity for exchange through the open sharing of experiences and impressions and to support courage and openness to try out new things. True to the motto: „It matters how we open knowledge“.
Audio recording and transcript with Axel Dürkop (ITBH) and Florian Hagen (tub.)
On 28.10.2021 Axel Dürkop and Florian Hagen met for a „break chatter“ about Open Access Week 2021 and the partial motto “It matters how we open knowledge” via Zoom. The recording of the conversation is offered in this article unabridged as an audio file (German) as well as a “simplified” transcript (verbatim transcription, including omitting word duplications and adjusting punctuation to improve readability).
Some of the offerings, materials and services mentioned in the recording:
[00:00:00.880]
– Florian Hagen
Yes, to maybe set the context right away, let’s just get started now. A long time ago, we actually thought about recording a podcast on the topic of “It Matters How to Open Knowledge”. Before we start, I’d like to introduce myself: I’m Florian Hagen, I’m a specialist for Open Access and Open Education at the TUHH. Axel Dürkop and I often meet for a chat, and today we just thought we’d record our chat on this topic. And maybe you would like to introduce yourself to Axel?
[00:00:35.700]
– Axel Dürkop
Yes, thank you, I am Axel Dürkop. I work across the street at the TU Hamburg as a scientific consultant for technical development and conception for the Hamburg Open Online University at the TU Hamburg. And that’s how we met. We can talk about it again in a moment. Exactly. Yes, shall we also say something about earlier? Decades ago, training and all that?
[00:01:02.930]
– Florian Hagen
You can do that, I have omitted it now.
[00:01:04.000]
– Axel Dürkop
Or I don’t have to say. Maybe later. Okay. Yeah, how did we meet?
[00:01:11.780]
– Florian Hagen
I think we met in 2018, when the Hackerspace events were still taking place at TU. And Thomas Hapke, my old boss, just sort of tucked me under his arm and took me to Hackerspace. He said, that’s a nice thing to do. And what the Hackerspace actually is, maybe you can say something about it for everyone.
[00:01:41.550]
– Axel Dürkop
Yeah, that’s right. So the Hackerspace was… I don’t even know when we started it. Right now it’s dormant, which was partly due to the pandemic, because it actually consists of… so the fun comes from meeting, really meeting each other. We had done quite a lot of stuff in 2015 as part of the Hamburg Open Online University, which we also call HOOU for short, which we knew very well how to do in a small group and it was very innovative.
[00:02:07.700]
– Axel Dürkop
And it’s still somehow the basis for the things that you and I have done together, for example. We can also say something about that in a moment. We then had the feeling that we would like to share this knowledge because we were just so excited about what we were doing. And we thought, “Let’s tell others and see if they think it’s so great, too.” And the hackerspace format is one that we didn’t invent ourselves, but hackspaces are more of an international movement where people say they want to have a self-determined space where they can tinker and hack.
[00:02:43.830]
– Axel Dürkop
And hacking is, in a positive sense, the creative use of technology. So, and we also offered that and met every Wednesday, for at least two years every Wednesday afternoon and did our work as always or tried things out. And when other people came, we talked about technology and said what we were working on, others said what they were working on, and thus actually exemplified a culture of sharing or practiced it with ourselves.
[00:03:19.490]
– Florian Hagen
From my perspective, of course, I can only agree with that. If I think back, I got a lot out of Hackerspace and I thought it was a great opportunity to come together from completely different disciplines and to exchange ideas on certain topics in a certain interdisciplinary way. So at that time, we also had the idea of our tub.orials blog… that is, a blog offering that is also about openness around science, research and teaching. And I’m still of the opinion, but I can’t remember exactly, that you put a flea in my ear at some point … that the blog is a good thing first of all as a means of communication. But it would be even cooler to somehow make it even more sustainable and reusable. So I think that somehow the idea arose from this exchange within Hackerspace. We always have a license notice at the bottom, because the things are all openly licensed and there we link the material for reuse and also the texts themselves are offered in marketdown format.
[00:04:34.740]
– Florian Hagen
And I think that’s still a really cool thing and I’ve heard at least occasionally from people who just take out the texts again, because it’s often the case that you can’t get something like that out of a blog so easily.
[00:04:49.310]
– Axel Dürkop
Yes, so I can’t claim this authorship for myself now as you just attributed it to me. But it may well be, because I was extremely enthusiastic about the possibilities of GitLab and GitHub then and still am today. That was just also what we were trying to kind of share there. That what we learned there. We got GitLab up and running at TU in 2015, in a framework that was supposed to make it possible for everyone to work with GitLab, and now it is. And my approach to it was not so much to use it for software development, but for the development of texts and just open educational materials, which can also be programmed, of course. But I still have great fun working with this collaboration platform and web-based texts or media. And what you’re doing there with the blog is also depositing things in Git Lab so that you can download them there. And for me, that’s what I’ve already said.
[00:05:52.100]
– Axel Dürkop
I think it’s a great example of simply providing access to knowledge, simply also in a technically simplified form. You don’t have to know anything about GitLab or Git if you want to take your texts. You just offer them again in other formats in a meaningful place for download, so that other people can somehow continue to work with it. And I think that’s great, because the 5-R of Wiley are, according to my observation, rarely followed through in the last consequence. Namely, they say, for example, here are the raw materials. So you don’t have to scrape this off the website, but I give it to you in such a way that you can continue working with it quickly. And I think that’s great with the blog you have.
[00:06:32.360]
– Florian Hagen
Yes, thank you again for your feedback. So basically… we are moving a bit in the context of the Hamburg Open Online University, the HOOU. The blog was created in this context and GitLab was also often used for various materials. Recently, I have to say, I don’t even remember when exactly it was, the stARTcamp online took place. And you also offered a session or a contribution on the topic of learning circles as part of the stARTcamp. And to be honest, I don’t really remember why I wasn’t there. Maybe I had offered another session at the same time or it was a different date. But could you explain again what these Learning Circles are all about?
[00:07:24.890]
– Axel Dürkop
Yes, very much so. I think I came across Learning Circles in 2015 when I started to get more involved with Open Educational Resources and sharing education or knowledge online. And I always found the Learning Circles, as they were developed by the Peer to Peer University, strikingly good. Because they identified what is still a fundamental problem today when we talk about open access or about the inequities in access to education. People often say that it’s on the web, let’s put it on the web, let’s put Creative Commons licenses on it, and then they assume that that’s enough. But I think that’s only a necessary condition, that it’s openly available, so to speak. Because if it wasn’t, there would be no need to talk further. So it’s necessary that it’s freely accessible, openly accessible, and that it can be reused. But it is not sufficient, because it has become clear in the context of digitization that many people do not necessarily use it to learn, despite this accessibility. And the idea of learning circles is that back then, people took Massive Open Online Courses that are freely accessible and learned together with them in learning circles.
[00:08:54.120]
– Axel Dürkop
And this idea has become very strong. It has become very popular in different countries. In Africa, too, it has developed in its own direction, but it’s very strong and people use it to acquire freely accessible content in a very self-determined way, and ever since I knew about it, I’ve always wanted to do that because I thought, “This is how it has to be,” so let’s take content from the web and let’s find didactic forms with which people can learn with it. And then I organized a Learning Circle together with Gabi Fahrenkrog and Sarah Politt from the Bücherhallen, and the topic was robotics and AI. And we not only learned together four times, four evenings, sorry, six evenings together, but we also published what we had compiled there as a small compendium of a curated collection of links at the end.
[00:09:53.010]
– Florian Hagen
However, this means that a Learning Circle is not just for individuals who say that they would like to learn something additional or simply adopt a different form of learning in social interaction with a group that I may not yet know. But that would also be something, so that’s how it sounded to me now, if I have a small team or a small group that perhaps also want to exchange ideas with other people on a certain topic, that this is also a possibility for a kind of team development or team building? Because we often talk about joint writing in other projects where we work together. So that would also be something of a team development aid or measure, so to speak?
[00:10:48.000]
– Axel Dürkop
That’s a good idea. I think that in some cases there is perhaps a working group or a learning group and they do it together. I think that’s the crucial thing about it, that in-house training or continuing education works best when it’s project-related and people do it together. That’s why I think what you’re proposing certainly makes sense. Especially because it is not related to Friday afternoon and Saturday and then certificate and then is learned. It’s more about saying that this is a work-related project that you work on and grow. For example, the Hackerspace and these contexts have given rise to various formats of continuing education programs at the TU over the years that I have reported on. These also bring the idea of sharing knowledge and experience, and not just my knowledge and experience, i.e. when I organize them. But what I find great is that others, who have perhaps already worked with it or have first experiences or even advanced experiences, also share them. In other words, it’s not about one person knowing and passing it on in the classic sense, but I think the great thing about it (also about the Learning Circles) is that “everybody is an expert”. It’s not about who has the most expertise and the most experience, but who perhaps also has the courage to articulate diverse perspectives on the topic and to rub shoulders with each other, and that simply creates new things. I think that’s great. And that was also the idea behind Hackerspace. That you don’t lecture others about what you know, but rather I’m excited about it, may I show you something. And then someone says, that’s great, but look what I’m doing. And then you say, “Okay, thanks,” and you go out and you’ve enriched each other. That’s great. That’s what that runs to. And so I also think what you’re suggesting is a great way to share knowledge within a company or university.
[00:13:07.000]
– Florian Hagen
Yeah, cool, thanks for the insight. When you just said Hackerspace again… As someone who has participated in it, it’s immediately apparent that some of the virtues of this Learning Circles approach have perhaps already taken place in an unplanned way. So, that people simply share among themselves and that they definitely take something with them. You can really see parallels there, without it having been planned that way at the time when the Hackerspace was started. So I think.
[00:13:45.000]
– Axel Dürkop
I don’t remember that exactly, it could be. It has parallels, of course. The parallel is: people just learn well in groups. That’s why – for example, if the motto of this year’s Open Access Week is “It Matters How to Open Knowledge” – then the “how” is precisely what needs to be emphasized. That’s what I was talking about earlier. It’s not enough that we put everything on the Internet. It’s the same with Open Data. That’s a nice thing, yes. But I have to know the context, I have to know how to get at it and what I can do with it. And that requires a certain expertise. And to gain this expertise, to get there… that is certainly also a very honorable educational mission of universities and perhaps also libraries to say “Ok, we build the bridges there”. That’s why this “how.” It’s not done with it being on the web. But it starts with. Ok, we’ve got something nice here, don’t you guys feel like and how can we help you. And that’s certainly the case with Hackerspace, but also with the Learning Circle. A connecting idea, just to see who is there and what does the individual person need and to help people find access to themselves for themselves.
[00:15:02.000]
– Florian Hagen
You’ve just mentioned it yourself, so perhaps one more question to conclude our little exchange. This year’s motto is “It Matters How to Open Knowledge” and we haven’t agreed on any questions beforehand. Listeners can’t see that right now, but you’re already looking very curious about what might come next. As I’ve said before, when we talk to each other, I actually take something away from every conversation. So you always put an idea in my head or point me to something, a material or something, which I always find inspiring in some way for me or for teaching and for my own learning. If you now think about “opening up” knowledge, are there any projects or materials from the fields of open science, open access or other openness movements that you find inspiring or simply worth a look if you are interested in them? Of course, reading recommendations are also welcome.
[00:16:09.000]
– Axel Dürkop
Reading recommendations I would have to think a bit longer now. I have a new topic that totally excites me. I’m just saying that now because I’m so excited myself right now and it’s sweeping me away. I don’t know if others find it so great. But I’ve always found… or lately, always I can’t say. But I’ve been watching alternatives to the traditional internet for about 4 years. I think that’s exciting right now. And there’s a whole bunch of stuff that I’m seeing there that’s emerging. Traditional internet or traditional web is what we know like that. Small server and we provide, for example, Open Educational Resources to download and have places where they are. There’s sort of traditionally the idea that we have servers and that’s also the problem that we have right now with big platforms. That they have simply become very powerful. That’s not yet the case in the OER context, it’s not a problem there. But I was interested in what this “peer to peer” actually is, because of course this is also and this is perhaps the connection to the peer to peer university… this peer to peer, so people among themselves without a mediating authority in the middle. What kind of technical systems does that give off. And there is the Fediverse, the federated network, which actually dispenses with central servers as far as possible, but works in a decentralized way. There are no middle men or middle women, so to speak. I find that very exciting right now, and there are very interesting technical developments that I’m currently trying to check for their usefulness for sharing. Is it too complicated? Is it resilient? That’s one thing that comes to my mind right now. I don’t know if that’s as exciting to others. But one piece of software I’m experimenting with right now in a course is the Beaker Browser, which allows you to instantly set up a peer to peer network of educational materials with each other without a server. What I find exciting is the Interplanetary File System, which unfortunately sounds totally silly when you say it… But, it’s gotten very big and it intends to do exactly the same thing, which is share whatever without a central cluster. For me, that would be knowledge or information set up. I think that’s very cool, I’m very excited about that right now. I want to check that for teaching and the openness movement in the area of open science and open education.
[00:18:51.000]
– Florian Hagen
Cool. So I haven’t heard of all or almost all of those things. With the system that you mentioned last. I was kind of stuck on “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. I’ll definitely take a look at that. It’s actually a pity that there’s currently no such possibility that you can simply meet on site and work on your own ideas and then in this framework, as it was for example also at Hackerspace, just have a quick look, what is that actually. Nevertheless, I’ll be happy to take a look at that. And that brings us more or less to the end of our short exchange.
[00:19:39.000]
– Axel Dürkop
Wait a minute. You were kind enough to ask me what’s on my mind right now. But now you tell me, what is it that’s getting you excited right now?
[00:19:52.000]
– Florian Hagen
What is it that gets me excited about Open Science, Open Access, Open Education, Openness? There are actually quite a few things that are floating around in my head. At the moment I’m doing this in my course… Well, we have a course on “Scientific Work” for Bachelor students at the TU. And I often sit down again after the lectures, because the students always have a lot of input, from which I also take a lot and learn. And I still try to capture something like that in script form and share that with everyone. And often that happens through collaborative writing tools like HedgeDoc, which I think used to be CodiMd. And I feel the need sometimes that at the end of the semester, I would just like to have all these scripts that I’ve written, I’d like to bang those in somewhere so that I could just have a cohesive PDF generated from those scripts. So sort of a little brochure at the end of the semester. I have already been told by students that it is very pleasant to have everything collected again. Of course you can also save the links via literature management or other possibilities. But often it is still the case that you like to print something out and put your own comments and annotations on a normal PDF. That’s something that came up again today in a lecture. I think I’ve mentioned this before, that I had thought about how you could implement this somehow, so that the additional effort is not so great. But that you get a stable format or a digital artifact at the end. That’s what I’m interested in right now.
[00:21:55.000]
– Axel Dürkop
Yes, I find that very exciting. I have already experimented with it. I find HedgeDoc just as exciting and indispensable in the meantime for many things that I do. And since you can export them wonderfully, not only in the social form of HedgeDoc learning, but you can also use them technically. So everybody can take it for their own purposes, similar to what you mentioned for your blog as well. And yeah, what we need then is an automated form of downloading and aggregating to create a compendium like that. Yeah, let’s get together on that.
[00:22:34.000]
– Florian Hagen
Look, here we are again with a topic we can work on together.
[00:22:41.000]
– Axel Dürkop
Absolutely right, very nice.
[00:22:44.000]
– Florian Hagen
Very cool. What I actually wanted to say just now, first of all, thank you for finding the time today so that we can just talk about it again as part of Open Access Week. And we’ll probably see each other again in the next few days in some meeting. But I also hope that the one or the other who listened to this recording now, that there was also something interesting to take away from our chat. Just like I always do when we exchange ideas.
[00:23:16.000]
– Axel Dürkop
Yes, thank you very much for the initiative that we met here. I think your questions about the hackerspace and our conversation about it made it clear once again how important it actually is. So you and I now also have a concrete plan of what we have to do now. That we now meet again and that this format simply gets going again, now that it is hopefully possible to meet again. We have face-to-face teaching again, it works. That’s why we should perhaps take this as a prelude to thinking about whether we should first revive this possibility of sharing knowledge in our small project, which we had now considered, but then perhaps in a wider circle.
[00:23:57.000]
– Florian Hagen
I would definitely be there.
Are you planning to publish in a journal and don’t know what funding options are possible? The TU Library can provide funding for articles in a number of ways. Our Publishing Fund enables the financing of articles in pure Open Access journals (Gold OA). If the criteria for funding are met, TU members can submit a funding request through the OA website. Furthermore, TUHH’s participation in the DEAL agreement allows OA publishing in hybrid and gold journals published by SpringerNature and Wiley.
We have illustrated in a flowchart which questions you need to ask to find out whether the criteria for funding are met and what the workflow looks like after a funding application has been approved. For optimal display, the “Fullscreen” option (top right) should be selected within the H5P element.
If you have any questions about Open Access and funding an article, please feel free to write to us at openaccess@tuhh.de.
As part of the OpenAPC initiative, all APC payments made by the TU Library are published as Open Data. This provides an overview of the costs related to the TUHH, at the same time showing to which publishers the money flowed:
In 2020, the tub. publication fund financed pure gold open access articles with a total amount of €65,157. There are also articles with the publishers SpringerNature and Wiley that run via the DEAL contract.
Open access is understood to mean free access to quality-assured scientific information and other materials. All people worldwide have unrestricted, free access to OA publications. The TUHH has supported the Open Access movement and its goals for many years. With TORE (formerly tub.dok), there has been an OA repository since 2002, which now enables the storage of research data and functions as a research information system. The TU is a signatory of the “Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities” of 2003 and reached another milestone with the establishment of a publication fund in 2013. This fund supports publications by young TU scientists. With the unanimous adoption of the openTUHH Policy in the Academic Senate of the TUHH on 26.09.2018, the topic of openness in research and teaching at the university received additional support. The policy emerged from the Hamburg Open Science (HOS) and Hamburg Open Online University (HOOU) projects. The goal: to further promote digital cultural change at the university (More on HOOU and HOS projects of tub. on the TU Library project page). For these efforts around openness and further open access services, the tub. 2020 was awarded as an “open library“.
However, especially for newcomers and outsiders, there are always many questions surrounding OA and the numerous fields of development, such as “What is meant by green OA?”, “What are the differences between gold and hybrid journals?” or “Why shouldn’t people publish in closed access?” In order to make Open Access and its advantages more accessible to as many interested parties as possible, the Open Access team has compiled a small glossary. The compilation is based on questions around Open Access terminology, which is a frequent topic in consultation scenarios:
“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).
Citavi is a windows-based standalone literature management program, which is characterized by comprehensive functionality and ease of use and can be used in research and teaching. The TUHH provides access to Citavi to all members and thus also to the students of the TUHH within the framework of a Campuslizenz.
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 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, 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 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.
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.
Zotero is a literature management application that helps to collect and organize literature and, if necessary, to integrate the respective literature into one’s own writing projects. It is open source software that runs on all major operating systems. A introduction in text and video form is available on our tub.torials blog.
Have you come across other unclear terms related to Open Access that are missing from the glossary? Let us know via openaccess@tuhh.de or feel free to attend the open, virtual office hours.
As part of Open Access Week 2021, we are offering an open, virtual office hour on Open Access on 10/28/2021. Feel free to bring your questions or just take the opportunity to get to know the Open Access team:
