The department „Research Information” offers a comprehensive service: all current article publications by researchers of the WZB can be made accessible online systematically, as soon as possible and permanently, even if they are available through payments to publishing houses only (so called Green Open Access).

The legal base for this republishing is on the one hand the German “Urheberrecht”, i.e. the intellectual property rights granted to all authors. In §38,4, authors are given the indispensable right to republish their work. On the other hand, several Open Access clauses within current subscription contracts (e.g. national licenses) allow for a republishing. Finally, the contracts between the publishing house and the authors may allow authors to publish Open Access under certain conditions.

Republishing of journal articles in Open Access will be primarily done in EconStor, the repository managed by the ZBW – the Leibniz Information Centre for Economics – which is one of the most renowned Open-Access-Servers in Germany with respect to visibility, user friendliness and reliability. Furthermore, the articles can be found via regular searches in the WZB Publication search as well as in regular search engines. The work will also be available in the Social Science Open Access Repository (SSOAR) as well as in several catalogues such as the Kooperativer Bibliotheksverbund Berlin-Brandenburg (KOBV) and the Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog (KVK).

More Information on Open Access is available online here.

In case of questions please contact us (openaccess [at] wzb.eu).