Useful information for university management
In this section we have compiled information of particular interest to university management. Practical tips and concrete replies to questions on specific topics can be found in the FAQ section. Since we wish to expand and optimise open-access.net progressively, in line with user needs and feedback, we welcome your input. So please don't hesitate to send us an e-mail if you have any questions, comments or suggestions.
Open Access at universities: arguments for university management
The promotion of unrestricted access to scholarly knowledge, a key resource for scientists, scholars and students alike, is a strategic task for university management. Because of spiralling journal prices and the relatively high profit margins of some publishing houses, the viability of traditional licensing and business models for scholarly journals – especially in the human and natural sciences – is limited. The budgets of the individual research institutions alone are no longer sufficient to maintain subscriptions to costly journals (the serials crisis). One consequence is that the visibility of the individual university’s scholarly output drops. At the same time, restricted access to information on the part of scholars also has a detrimental effect on research. This is a pressing problem for universities and it can only be solved by making far-reaching structural changes in the area of scholarly publishing. Since individual universities are limited in what they can do to effect substantial improvement in the information supply, these problems can only be tackled cooperatively: by making a reasonable amount of personnel and funds available for the promotion of Open Access, universities can invest now in order to benefit later from the collective dividends.
As a result of a decision taken at the autumn 2009 session of the Main Committee of the German Research Foundation (DFG), universities can in future apply for DFG funding to finance their scientists' and scholars' publications in genuinely Open Access journals. With this new funding instrument, the DFG wishes to give universities an incentive to develop reliable and stable structures for financing publications in Open Access journals.
More and more research groups and teaching networks are being organised on a trans-institutional or trans-national basis. However, cooperation is sometimes hampered by the fact that the range of available information differs. Many types of resources such as multimedia objects, experimental or observation data, simulations and informal communication forums such as weblogs and mailing lists are of increasing importance to the everyday work of researchers.
The advantages of Open Access for universities
Opportunities for electronic publishing and archiving at universities, for example in OA journals or in institutional and subject-based repositories, bring many advantages for the universities themselves and for other stakeholders:
- An opportunity to showcase the academic excellence of the university: institutional repositories register, store, preserve, disseminate and actively showcase the scholarly output of universities and research organisations. In this way they support the public relations strategy of the institution as a whole at a time when competition between universities is increasing and university management is constantly obliged to justify budgets and expenditure.
- The securing of the long-term availability of institutional research results.
- Repositories support essential communication in research, for example by facilitating the dissemination of, search for and access to scholarly content. By making content openly accessible, repositories increase the international visibility of research results and support intra-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary scholarly communication.
- Institutional repositories contribute to the standardisation of information structures in Germany and in an international context thereby facilitating value-added and end-user services.
- Research funders benefit from repositories because archives increase the international visibility of research which is funded locally, nationally or on a European level. This is increasingly relevant because research evaluation is becoming more and more important. In the course of developing an institutional profile (centres of excellence, University Concept 2010) regular evaluations of entire faculties or individual groups are also carried out at many universities in Germany. In the parameter-based allocation of funds, which is already the norm in many countries such as the UK and Scandinavia, the publications of faculty scholars are included as a key indicator.
- Other sectors such as education, health, government and industry can profit from the simplified access to qualified research information. Intermediaries such as information brokers can translate specialised research information into layman's language, thereby enhancing the innovative force of such research results. End-user services can be developed and made available by publicly-funded and commercial service providers.
Legal situation
The German Science and Humanities Council expects of scholars in their dual function as authors and users that they handle copyright in such a way that they reserve the right of secondary exploitation in order, for example, to facilitate self-archiving in university repositories (cf. Halle, Axel 2003: Wissenschaftliche Publikationskultur und Hochschulverlage, ZfBB, 50, S. 243. The culture of scholarly publishing and university presses – available in German only).
Under German law, universities are not entitled to mandate that the publications of their personnel be made openly accessible online. (This applies both to digital and print documents.) As a result, self-archiving does not yet take place on a large scale and is done on a voluntary basis.
Links for further reading
FAQ
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