Open Access Publishing
The publishing of scientific findings is the central concern of all researchers. Only through the publishing of research results does scientific work become visible to the scientific community.
Open access offers a new form of publishing to researchers besides the traditional way of publishing in print media.
"By 'open access' to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited." (http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read)
Many research institutions as well as numerous funding agencies support the idea of open access and encourage researchers to make their results available for Open Access.
In general, there are two roads researchers can take:
("Open Access Green")
("Open Access Gold")
Authors that aim to offer their work via open access media have to consider the legal framework. Especially if publications have already appeared in a „closed access“ medium, like a subscription-based journal, the legal framework of those journals or publishers applies. When making their scientific work accessible for the wider public on their own website or in an institutional repository, authors have to hold the right of use.
Ideally, the contracts between authors and publishers should be set up in a way that reserves the authors the right to archive their works in openly accessible online-archives or the document server of their own institution.
OA publishing in the repository of the University of Innsbruck (OA Green)
Primary publication in an Open Access journal (OA Gold)
Open Access Contact Point
University and State Library of Tyrol, Digital Services Department
Dr. Barbara Laner
Tel.: +43 (0)512 507 - 25401
Email: open-access@uibk.ac.at