Green, gold, platinum

At the end of the 19th century, scientific journals were an innovation that replaced the private correspondence of scholars and made scientific findings accessible to a wider audience. The internet enabled even faster and broader access to content with the electronic versions of journals, so that today almost all scientific journals are (also) accessible online.

More and more scientific articles are being published and more and more scientific journals are being founded, so that it is no longer possible for libraries to subscribe to all thematically relevant journals for their institutions. On the other hand, the costs of publishing on the Internet are considerably lower than they are for printed publications. In the interests of science, the idea therefore arose (Berlin Declaration on Open Access) to make all scientific publications freely available to everyone on the Internet, ideally with extensive rights for further use in research and teaching (and commercially).

The "green road": secondary publication of a scientific article on the author's homepage or on a specialist repository, such as arXiv, or on an institutional repository, such as our publication server. Publishers often allow the publication of pre- or postprints in this way. The rights that publishers normally allow are summarized in the Sherpa/RoMEO list. The contents of the Sherpa/RoMEO list are also used in the EZB and can be looked up there. Search engines such as BASE then bring the contents of the scattered repositories back together so that they can be searched jointly.

The "golden road": primary publication of the scientific article with an Open Access license. This can include publication in pure Open Access journals, but also the release of individual articles in hybrid journals whose main business model is still the subscription. Pure open access journals are listed in the DOAJ. To be included in the DOAJ, the journal must meet a number of quality criteria, including peer review.

The "platinum or diamond route": A variant of the golden route in which an underlying institution, usually a university or society, provides funding so that authors do not have to pay any fees.

The "bronze route": A variant of the golden route in which only the download via the publishing platform is permitted, but no further-reaching rights are granted.

In its university development plan, the TUC has set itself the goal of increasing the visibility of research. Open Access is a good way of doing this, because the easy accessibility means that Open Access articles are read more often and also cited more frequently.

Therefore, when looking for a suitable journal for your own publications, you should not forget the possibilities of Open Access. You may be able to find suitable open access journals via the DOAJ, and funders such as the DFG often pay article fees for open access articles. If no sponsor can be found, the TUC also has its own publication fund that pays for article fees in pure Open Access journals. If no open access journal comes into question, you should reserve the rights for a secondary publication if possible. It would also be a good idea to submit the preprint or postprint, depending on the rights granted by the publisher, to the library at the time of submission. The articles can then also be published on the publication server and thus receive further distribution. Easier accessibility means that your own publications are better recognized and then cited more frequently.

Green, gold, platinum: different paths to Open Access by Silke Frank is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.