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Open Access

What is Open Access (OA)?

Open Access (OA) is an international movement seeking to grant free and open online access to academic information, including publications and data. This means access without financial, legal, or technical barriers so that it can be read, downloaded, copied, distributed, printed, searched, or used in education or in any other way. As opposed to the traditional subscription model (in which readers have access to scholarly information by paying a subscription usually via libraries), OA is a publishing model that makes research information available to readers free of charge.

Existing OA strategies

  • The green road – self archiving – describes the simultaneous or subsequent archiving of digital publications on an institutional or disciplinary OA document server. (link)
  • The golden road – publishing – describes the first publication of scientific articles in OA journals. There are more than 10.000 OA journals listed in the DOAJ and several thousands of OA journals are already covered by Web of Science and Scopus. These articles go through a quality control process in the form of a peer review. Most OA publishers charge publication fees which the author (author fees) or their institution (institutional fees) pays. There is a fund in place to support researchers at Eawag, Empa, PSI and WSL and also from various funders, e.g. at SNSF.

For further information and links check the Lib4RI webpage for OA (source) or contact Lib4RI for questions/help via email.

OA policy at Empa

  • Empa has signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities
  • OA policy at Empa here: Empa supports open access to the publications of its researchers in the firm belief that this maximises the visibility, chances of usage and impact of research outputs.
  • If your are publishing in a full Open Access journal that charges a fee, funding of the article fee might be available via our Open Access Fund. Check out the funding conditions and application procedure here: Open Access Publication Fund.
  • How to increase the visibility of your research? Find out here.

Support

  • Lib4RI offers a training module on Open Access & Copyright here and other topics on managing scientific information.
  • Contact Lib4RI for OA support via e-mail.
Last update: November 11, 2024