Open access refers to free, unrestricted access to peer-reviewed scientific research. As part of open science, it facilitates the widespread dissemination and sustainable use of all research information.
The guidelines for implementing Open Science at FAU can be found in FAU’s Open Science Policy.
All content in pure open access journals is freely accessible. This content is published under a Creative Commons licence, meaning it can be freely reused. Publishing in these journals incurs a fee, which varies significantly depending on the journal. FAU offers financial support towards these fees. – Publication Fund.
Most quality-assessed open access journals are listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals.
The B!son Open Access Journal Recommender suggests suitable open access journals based on your article abstract
As an additional guide to pure open-access journals, we recommend the oa-finder.
In a hybrid journal, the corresponding author can choose to publish the article as open access or not. If you select open access, a fee will apply. If you do not select open access, no fee will apply, but readers will need a subscription to access the article.
FAU will only cover the costs of hybrid articles if a “publish-and-read” agreement is in place. In that case, however, the costs will be covered in full.
There are no publication fees or subscription costs.
You can find quality-assured Diamond Journals at the Diamond Discovery Hub.
Learn more about Diamond Open Access at FAU:
Books are also published through open access. Many open access publishers are listed in the Directory of Open Access Books and the OAPEN Library. The OA Books Toolkit can help you get started with publishing open access books.
Open-access book publications incur a publication fee. If your book is related to a DFG project at FAU, however, you may be eligible for a grant from the book fund. Otherwise, you can contact the foundations that support FAU: https://www.fau.de/universitaet/foerderung-und-unterstuetzung/stiftungen/
Most publishers allow you to republish certain versions of your article through a repository, such as OPEN FAU.
Look up publisher terms and conditions at https://openpolicyfinder.jisc.ac.uk/
- Open License for Open Access Content
- Ehat is Creative Commons? https://de.creativecommons.net/was-ist-cc/
- The University Library recommends the CC-BY license: Reasons for choosing CC-BY
- Allows readers to reuse the content freely
- Publishers retain copyright ownership of the content
- If a publisher wishes to retain the copyright and exclusive rights of use, please use the Scholar’s Copyright Addendum https://labs.creativecommons.org/scholars/ and https://creativecommons.org/about/legal-tools-licenses/author-addenda/
- General Information on Copyright: https://irights.info/
- Preprint: version submitted for peer review
- Author’s Accepted Manuscript / Postprint: including all changes from the peer review, prior to publisher formatting
- Publisher’s / Final Version: the final version published by the publisher
Open Educational Resources are freely accessible teaching and learning materials. If you would like to make your materials available to the public, please note the following:
Do you have the rights to make publicly available any third-party content included in the materials, such as images? Are you permitted to publish all elements under a Creative Commons license?
Instead of saving files as a Word document (.docx), can you save them in an open file format, such as OpenDocument Text (.odt)?
Would you like to update the materials on an ongoing basis? If so, StudOn would be a better option than OPEN FAU. You can also use an open educational resource (OER) repository, such as OER Commons.
A wide range of information on finding and creating open educational resources is available at https://open-educational-resources.de/
For more information and frequently asked questions, please visit our Open Access FAQ.