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Explain! Open Access

Open Access is defined by the Budapest Open Access Inititative (BOAI) Declaration in 2002 to scientific and scholarly literature as the “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.”

Therefore, the aim of Open Access is to make scientific and scholarly literature and materials freely accessible to all internet users. One essential aspect of Open Access is the maximisation of the dissemination of scientific and scholarly information. Open Access wants to make them accessible online free of charge and as free of technical and legal barriers as possible.

Open Access to publications and research data enables (re)use and application of research results, increases impact and enables critical evaluation.

Today, journals’ high subscription costs and the lack of research data management and archiving still constitute a substantial barrier for international knowledge exchange and innovation. Research funders and institutions world-wide acknowledge that Open Access to research findings improves the knowledge transfer and promotes collaboration.

Open Access at Göttingen Campus

Further information

  • Open-Access.net: Information platform on Open Access to Scientific Information
  • ‘Open Access‘: book by Peter Suber, MIT Press 2012
  • ‘Open Access’ by Bargheer, Margo and Birgit Schmidt, in: Konrad Umlauf and Stefan Gradmann, Handbuch Bibliothek, 2012 (in German)
  • Information on Open Access by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) (in German)

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