Informationsplattform Open Access: Psychology

Psychology

In this section we have compiled some information on Open Access (OA) in the field of psychology. If you have any comments or suggestions, please do not hesitate to send us an E-mail.

 

General information on Open Access in the field of psychology

In September 2004, the Commission for Information and Communication (IuK) of the German Psychological Society (DGPs) decided by majority vote in favour of DGP's accession to the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. The Berlin-based New Society for Psychology (NGfP) also supports Open Access. In early 2008, NGfP signed the Budapest Open Access Initiative and the Petition for guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results directed to the European Commission.

The Leibniz Association's Institute for Psychological Information and Documentation (ZPID) is the supra-regional documentation and information centre for psychology in German-speaking countries. ZIPD provides a wide range of customised services for research, study, further training and education, companies, the media, the political sector and the interested public. Services include the psychology search engine PsychSpider, the psychology data archive PsychData, which contains empirical data sets from major psychological research projects, and PsychLinker, a comprehensive Internet catalogue of annotated links to psychology resources. In accordance with the Berlin Declaration on Open Access, the ZPID supports free access to information in the sciences because such free access is a distinguishing feature of pluralistic democratic societies, of all fields of science and of good scientific practice (ZPID Mission Statement).

The Special Subject Collection Psychology at the Saarland University and State Library (SULB) has been in existence since 1966. In 1998, with funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG), the SULB set up the Virtual Library of Psychology. In October 2002, the SULB and the ZIPD launched a joint DFG-funded project entitled Digital Psychology Information (DPI) with the aim of improving the availability and accessibility of information in the field of psychology. The focus of the project was on online information and digital publications. One of the DPI work packages was the implementation of the subject-based archive PsyDok. Launched in 2003, this full-text repository operated by the SULB offers members of the psychological community the opportunity to self-archive their scholarly output (for example monographs, journal articles and dissertations).

 

We would like to thank Mr Ulrich Herb of the SULB and Dr. Erich Weichselgartner of the ZPID for making their texts available to us and for the other useful information they provided.

References

Further reading

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Open Access journals

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Subject-based repositories and databases

  • PsyDok, the full-text archive of the Virtual Library of Psychology of the SULB
  • CogPrints, an inter-disciplinary electronic archive for the entire spectrum of cognitive sciences
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Content mentor

Content mentor:

Ulrich Herb, Saarland University and State Library

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