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Principles of open access

Berlin Universities Publishing (BerlinUP) is committed to the principles of open access. As an open access publisher, BerlinUP supports the science policy demand for open access to scientific knowledge, as expressed in particular in the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002), the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (2003), the Berlin Open Access Strategy (2015), and in the recommendations for the transformation of scientific publishing to open access by the German Council of Science and Humanities (2022).

Open access means worldwide public and free access to digital scientific publications without legal, technical, or financial barriers. This primarily includes journal articles, anthology contributions, and monographs. Users can read, copy, distribute, print, cite, link, and search and analyze open access publications without restriction.

In order to meet these requirements, BerlinUP follows the open access policies of the four supporting institutions as well as established standards and recommendations for open access publishing in the context of open research. These include, in particular, the German Research Foundation (DFG) guidelines for safeguarding good scientific practice, Plan S for publicly funded research, and the FAIR principles for research data.

The following principles apply to us:

  • Open access publishing: All publications in the publishing divisions, BerlinUP Books and BerlinUP Journals, as well as the publisher’s own publications such as information material or documentation, appear as first publications in open access without any time delay. In addition, books can also appear in printed form if required. Thus, BerlinUP complies with the criteria of gold open access.
  • No publication fees: As an institutionally funded, non-commercial publisher, BerlinUP does not charge publication fees such as article processing charges or book processing charges as standard. Optional additional services are excluded from this. BerlinUP thus complies with the diamond open access criteria.
  • Simple rights of use: Authors transfer only simple rights of use to BerlinUP and remain in possession of the rights of use to their works. This means that they are free to publish their work in other venues as well.
    Creative commons licenses: All publications receive a creative commons license. Our recommended standard is the most permissive license form: attribution (CC BY).
  • Persistent identifiers: All publications receive persistent identifiers for unique, long-term identifiability and better findability. For this purpose, BerlinUP primarily uses the established standard of the Digital Object Identifier (DOI). We also recommend the specification of metadata for author identification (ORCID iD) and research institutions (ROR ID).
  • Open metadata: The metadata and citation data of publications are freely accessible, machine-readable, and reusable. This increases visibility, such as through discovery systems and search engines, and enables bibliometric analyses, such as through publication platforms and literature databases.
  • FAIR principles: We recommend that associated research data also be published and linked to the publications of the research results. Attention should be paid to compliance with the FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, Reuse).. For research data publications, repositories within the BUA or external repositories can be used.
  • Long-term archiving: Long-term archiving and availability is guaranteed by the repositories within the BUA as well as by the German National Library.

In addition, within the framework of BerlinUP Consultancy, we support researchers of the BUA on open access publishing issues with a comprehensive range of consulting services.

Open access statements:

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