User:Filippo Morsiani/Open access in Germany

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Open Access in Germany is progressed by initiatives from research organisations, the Federal Government and the Länder.

A large number of institutional and discipline-specific repositories exist in Germany, which are maintained mostly by universities and research institutes. As of July 2015 OpenDOAR registers 172 open access institutional repositories. The German Initiative for Network Information (DINI) is supporting a national repository infrastructure. 

DOAJ indexes 354 German

History

The 2003 Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities has been initiated by the German Max-Planck-Society. Since its adoption the Berlin Declaration has been signed by 53 German Institutions, including the big research organizations and the German Rectors' Conference which represents 258 universities and other higher education institutions.

In 2013

• Awareness of open access amongst individual researches could be stronger.
• Many, but not all universities have an open access policy.
• Possible misunderstanding on issues of copyright and intellectual property.[3]

International initiatives

The German research organisations are taking part in working groups on Open Access on an international level, e.g. the EUROHORCs working group on Open Access and Knowledge Exchange. 

National and institutional policies

The big research organisations and many institutions of higher education have open access policies. ROARMAP registers 22 open access policies. The Federal Ministry of Education and Research supports open access. It also provides information on open access on its website and plans to develop an open access strategy in the new legislative term.

The main research funding body, the German Research Foundation (DFG), provides lump sums for covering publication costs including Open Access fees and also has a funding programme for publicising where universities can apply for funding in order to cover Open Access publication charges by university-based authors. From 2010 onward, the DFG financially supports so-called Alliance Licenses only under the condition that the publishers whose journals are licensed permit German authors and their institutions to deposit their articles from the licensed journals in open access repositories. The DFG has also tied open access to its funding policy: Recipients of DFG-Funding are expected to make their research results to be published and to be made available, where possible, digitally and on the internet on an open access basis.^[4]

In 2016 the

• The
  open access journals within 12 months.^[6]

The German open access community has developed a range of tools and services—many of them with initial funding from the German Research Foundation through the DFG—access.net, a DINI certificate that sets standards and best practices for repository services, a network of open access repositories and services on top of repositories, and a collaboration of university presses. A registry of research data repositories has been recently launched. These national projects are linked to international activities through collaboration with COAR, Knowledge Exchange, OAPEN, DOAB and other initiatives.^[7]

Open educational resources

While there are sustained activities to encourage open access for scientific research in Germany, awareness of open educational resources is low and no funding is available. At a Bielefeld conference in 2011 stakeholders signed a declaration to disseminate the concept of open educational resources. Following the conference initiatives were launched, such as information provision to German teachers about open educational resources under Creative Commons. in 2013 the Wikimedia Foundation organised the first German open educational resources conference in Berlin. The Federal Government has since commissioned a study to investigate the potential benefits of open educational resources.^[8]

References