General Information on Open Access

IHS is a signatory of the Berlin Declaration of Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.

Open Access means free access to academic literature and other material via the Internet. For a long time, libraries and the scientific community had to tolerate more and more disproportionate cost increases from many scholarly journals. To begin a new era of scholarly publication, funding bodies, institutions and libraries encourage researchers to publish in Open Access journals or repositories. Open Access publications offer advantages to both authors of scholarly literature or data and the recipients of this information: immediate access to information at no charge; increased citation and visibility of documents; good exposure of the document through relevant search engines, and the protection of authors’ exploitation rights.

There are various ways to provide open access to research results. One strategy is to publish in a (peer-reviewed) open access journal (Gold Open access), another one is the self-archiving in a repository (Green Open Access), usually after a delay required by the publisher.

If you like to choose the golden way, please visit the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) to find a suitable journal. There are nearly 10.000 journals for all kinds of subjects listed and described.

Detailed information on Open Access in general, article processing charges, impact factors, rights and more, you can find on the Open Access Information Platform (in German).