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Open Access Projects

Here you will find an extensive annotated list of non-commercial and commercial Open Access projects. This list is updated on a regular basis. Should you notice that an important project is not listed here, please send us an e-mail to the following address: info(at)openaccess-germany.de

Projects relating to Open Access journals

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
DOAJ is a directory of Open Access journals covering free, full-text, quality-controlled scientific and scholarly journals.
The Electronic Journal Library
The Electronic Journal Library (EZB) is a collaborative project involving some 510 libraries. It aims to give users easy and comfortable access to electronic scientific and scholarly journals. A traffic-light system indicates the accessibility of full texts.
Digital Peer Publishing (DIPP NRW)
In cooperation with libraries, DIPP NRW supports new forms of scientific and scholarly communication under Open Access conditions by providing scholars and scientists with technical, legal and organisational support.
German Medical Science
German Medical Science is an Open Access portal for online journals, congress abstracts and papers, and research reports from the entire field of medicine. It is directed at all those who work on or with scientific publications.
GIGA
Since December 2007, a project dedicated to the conversion of established social science journals to Open Access is being conducted at GIGA, the German Institute of Global and Area Studies.
Living Reviews
Living Reviews are Open Access journals with a unique editorial concept. Articles can be updated by the journals' authors at regular intervals to incorporate the latest developments in the research field in question.
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
PLoS is a non-profit Open Access project for scientific publications. Its aim is to "open the doors to the world's library of scientific knowledge" by building up a portfolio of scientific Open Access journals.
SCOAP3
SCOAP³ (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics) is a project run by leading High-Energy-Physics (HEP) funding agencies, HEP laboratories, and libraries. The aim of this pilot project is to convert the major HEP journals to Open Access in cooperation with the publishers.

Projects relating to Open Access publishing

Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Universitaetsverlage
The Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Universitaetsverlage is an association of university presses that brings together 17 university-based publishers from Germany, Austria and Northern Italy who encourage their authors to publish their work in accordance with the principles of the Open Access paradigm.
Co-Action Publishing
Co-Action Publishing is an international publisher of books and journals in the areas of medicine, the social sciences and the humanities.
Copernicus Publications
Founded in 1994 as a scientific publishing house, Copernicus Publications converted to Open Access in 2001. Its main focus is on geosciences, space sciences and planetary sciences.
OAPEN
OAPEN is a project funded within the framework of the European Commission's eContentplus Programme. Its objective is to develop and implement an Open Access publishing model for scientific and scholarly monographs in the humanities and the social sciences. The OAPEN consortium is made up of seven university presses.
Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA)
The goal of OASPA is to represent and promote the interests of Open Access publishers in all scientific, scholarly and technical disciplines by encouraging communication between them, by setting quality standards, and by advancing the development of business and publishing models.
Open Access Solution
The idea behind Open Access Solution is to bring together the service offerings of a number of suppliers in order to be able to offer small Open Access publishers a range of services at affordable prices.
Cooperation with publishers
The German Institute for International Educational Research (DIPF) promotes Open Access in the field of educational science. DIPF has entered into Open Access cooperation agreements with a number of publishers.
SHERPA/RoMEO
The SHERPA/RoMEO List provides information on publishers' policies with regard to the self-archiving of scientific and scholarly publications. It is not, however, legally binding and, in case of doubt, the publishing agreement prevails.

Repository-related projects

BASE
The BASE search engine harvests OAI metadata from scientific and scholarly repositories and indexes them using FAST software. BASE is a registered OAI service provider and has been a member of the EU project Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research (DRIVER) since June 2006.
DRIVER
The Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research (DRIVER), which was initiated in June 2006, is funded by the European Commission. Its objective is to create a scalable, robust infrastructure for networking the digital repositories of universities and research institutions in Europe and beyond.
Network of Open Access Repositories (OA-N)
The aim of the OA-N project is to promote the networking of repositories with a view to enhancing the national and international visibility of German research output. OA-N acts as an umbrella for DOARC, a virtual project consortium for OA statistics and citation, that will develop services such as usage statistics and citation analyses.
Open Access Statistics
Open Access Statistics (OA-S) is a collaborative project dedicated to the recording and processing of usage data and statistics across a wide range of repositories. The 18-month project, which began in July 2008, is in the process of creating an infrastructure for the standardised recording of usage data, especially those of institutional repositories. Collaborating closely with the Network of Open Access Repositories (OA-N), the project provides various user groups with value-added services for the use of scientific information.
OpenDOAR
OpenDOAR is a directory of academic Open Access repositories.
Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR )
The function of the registry are to monitor overall growth in the number of EPrints archives.
Webometrics Ranking of World
The Webometrics Ranking of World Universities is an initiative of the Cybermetrics Lab which is part of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), one of the largest research bodies in Spain. It publishes regular updates of its ranking of institutional and subject-based repositories worldwide. The ranking is intended to serve as an indicator of the visibility and efficacy of scientific and scholarly repositories
Twidox
Twidox is a free, user-generated online library.

Projects relating to legal issues and licences

Projects relating to legal issues

Coalition for Action: Copyright for Education and Research
This coalition for action on copyright wants to "ensure that the full potential of the digital media and communications systems remains open for use by the general public and, in particular, by science, and that these media and systems are not subject to restrictions which primarily serve the commercialisation of information by the private sector".
SHERPA/RoMEO
The Sherpa/RoMEO list provides information on publishers' policies with regard to the self-archiving of scientific and scholarly publications. It is not, however, legally binding and in case of doubt the publishing agreement prevails.
IUWIS - Infrastruktur Urheberrecht für Wissenschaft und Bildung (Infrastructure [devoted to] Copyright for Education and Research)
The goal of the IUWIS project is to build a platform that provides information on the current copyright framework for education and research and that collates and documents the various stances on copyright. The platform will also serve to support and foster direct dialogue on the subject of copyright.

Projects relating to free licences

Creative Commons Licences
Creative Commons is a non-profit corporation that offers a range of standard licences (CC Licences) that authors can use to grant the public rights of use in their works. The licences are freely accessible on the Internet and are compatible with various Web applications.
Digital Peer Publishing Licence
Designed especially for text works/e-journals, the Digital Peer Publishing Licence (DPPL), which is "made in Germany", is an alternative to the Creative Commons Licences. It comprises three core modules (the basic licence module, the modular licence and the free licence).
GNU General Public Licence
Die GNU General Public Licence (GPL) is a licence issued by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and is mainly intended for licensing free software.

Software projects

Repository software

EPrints Services
EPrints Repository Software is an open source platform for building repositories. The EPrints Services team offers a range of fee-based services such the hosting and maintenance of e-print repositories, the import of legacy data, technical support and client-specific training.
MyCore
MyCoRe is open source software that was developed collaboratively by scientists from universities throughout Germany. It provides a software core for document and publication servers or digital archives
DSpace
DSpace is an open-source repository software. It provides tools for indexing and preserving digital resources and making them available to end users. Since DSpace is based on the OAIS reference model, its architecture is suitable for the development of strategies to secure the long-term availability of digital material.
OPUS
The open source software OPUS enables users to publish and manage electronic full texts. It includes search and presentation modules, a URN allocation function and an OAI interface.
Fedora Repository
Fedora Repository is open source software for managing and accessing digital content in archives. Fedora complies with OAI (Open Archives Initiative) standards.

Journal software

Open Journal Systems (OJS)
OJS is open source software that was developed within the framework of the Canadian Public Knowledge Project by the University of British Columbia, the Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada and Stanford University. It assists with every stage of the online publishing process from submission through reviewing and editing to publication and reader comment.

Open Access in social networks

Mendeley is not only a research management tool but also an online social network for scholars and scientists. It allows users to organise all types of publication from newspaper articles to theses and to share them in PDF format with other researchers. It also generates recommendations for interesting and relevant resources based on the user's library and research interests. The service went online in August 2008 and by its own account it already has 100 000 members and 8 million documents. The fact that users can post their own publications on their Mendeley Web profile page and make them available to others is tantamount to self-archiving in parallel with publication, the so-called green road to Open Access.

ResearchGATE is an online social network for scholars and scientists. In addition to generating a profile page, it offers users the opportunity to communicate with fellow researchers, to manage their references and to search in various databases. It also generates suggestions for relevant publications and suggests suitable journals for the user's forthcoming publications. The platform has been online since May 2008 and by its own account it already has 140 000 members. What is special about Research GATE is the fact that it is linked to the SHERPA/RoMEO List: If a user identifies him/herself as the author of an article, ResearchGATE suggests that he or she make a full-text version of the publication available in Open Access. The SHERPA/RoMEO entry for the publisher in question is automatically displayed so that the author can see at a glance what the publisher's archiving policy is and what version of the article may be made available.

Other projects and activities relating to Open Access

CARPET
CARPET (Community for Academic Reviewing, Publishing and Editorial Technology) aims to build an electronic platform that provides a structured overview of available tools and services for electronic publishing thereby facilitating a more efficient use of existing tools and, at the same time, supporting the coordinated development of new tools by helping developers to avoid unnecessary replication. The platform will offer users adequate technical solutions for their respective contexts and provide recommendations on procedures and standards. As a forum for users and developers, CARPET aspires to become a virtual competence centre for electronic publishing. It will act as a showcase for internationally developed publishing tools provided these are open source.
CASPAR - Cultural, Artistic and Scientific knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval
CASPAR is the first European initiative aimed at building a common framework for the preservation, access and retrieval of digital information and at developing components to be used in all these activities.
DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE)
DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE) fosters collaborations and synergies between many national and international initiatives across the European Research Area thereby addressing the need for coordination, collaboration and consistency between current activities dedicated to the effective preservation of digital material.
The German Initiative for Networked Information (DINI)
DINI's Working Group "Electronic Publishing" supports electronic publishing at German universities by drawing up recommendations for document and publication servers and by organising training courses and presentations. In 2003, the Working Group introduced a standardised procedure for certifying repositories. Successful applicants are awarded the DINI Certificate for Document and Publication Servers.
kopal
Within the framework of the kopal project, the German National Library, the Lower Saxony State and University Library in Goettingen, the GWDG in Goettingen and IBM Germany are working collaboratively on a technological solution for long-term archiving. The focus of the project is not only on archiving but also on the preservation of digital documents in such a way that they will continue to be accessible in the future.
nestor
Within the framework of the nestor project, libraries, archives, museums and leading experts are working collaboratively on the subject of the long-term archiving and accessibility of digital sources. The project is funded by the Federal German Ministry of Education and Research. Its aims include "the constitution of a permanent form of organization for all issues of long-term preservation as well as the development of national and international agreements and the assignment of tasks".
open access plagiarism search (oaps)
The goal of this project is to improve the integrity of Open Access resources by developing plagiarism-detection procedures and by making a tool for automatic plagiarism detection in Open Access contexts available on the Web.
Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook (OASIS)
OASIS aims to provide information on the principles, concepts and advantages of Open Access and on strategies for its implementation. The OASIS website highlights developments and initiatives from around the world and provides links to a wide range of resources and case studies.
PEER
The EU-funded project PEER (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research) investigated the effects of Green Open Access on the availability, visibility and sustainability of journal literature and on the broader European research environment.
On 20 May 2009, the International Publishers Association (IPA), the International Association of Scientific Technical and Medical (STM) Publishers and the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) issued a joint statement on the subject of Open Access calling for a more differentiated debate on OA and encouraging the testing of new OA models.
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Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)
SPARC is an alliance of academies, university libraries and research organisations which promotes and develops low-cost alternatives to traditional publishing strategies.