Long duration of publication, intensification of problems with copyright as well as the journals’ crisis make scholarly communication and information supply difficult. In some disciplines scholarly journals are extremely expensive, sometimes by increases of annual subscription rates up to 15%.
The “Open Access(OA) movement”, which wants to make accessible scholarly information as common property for everybody all the time, primarily highlights two strategies for it.
- The Golden Way
Publication in Open-Access journals, which publish peer-reviewed articles freely available at no charge. In this case the authors or their institution pay the costs.
-> Directory of Open Access Journals
- The Golden Way
Self-archiving of documents:
Parallel publication via local university servers (“institutional repositories”). Many publishers allow this way meanwhile.
-> TUBdok – the publication server of TUHH
The OA movement gets support via the “Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities” through the large, German research organizations (e.g. DFG, FhG, HRK, MPG,…).