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Open Access

What is open access?


Open access is the objective of making scientific literature and materials accessible on the Internet free of charge and without license restrictions.
There are two ways of publishing according to the open-access principles. They are known as the gold road and the green road.

The gold road


The gold road refers to first publication in open-access journals, i.e. the articles are freely accessible immediately on publication.
A list of open-access journals can be found in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Some of these journals already have an impact factor.

The green road


The green road refers to “self-archiving”. Authors publish in “traditional” journals as before. A copy of the paper is then published with the permission of the journal publisher in a so-called “institutional repository” and is freely accessible from the Internet. Publishers who accept this process can be found in the SHERPA/ROMEO list.

New Elsevier's Open-Access-Policy