Publishing Open Access

Open access publications offer numerous advantages - they achieve a wide reach, increase the visibility and citation rate of publications and are easy to find via search engines and reference services. Quality control for open access books and open access journals is usually carried out by a peer review process, as is also the case with traditional forms of publication.

There are differing ways to publish a scientific work under Open Access conditions. One option is a primary publication, where the publication appears directly in Open Access.
The costs for an open access publication with a publisher usually have to be borne by the authors themselves. The University of Passau supports this type of publication by covering (a portion of) the publication fees for quality-checked open access journals and monographs through the Open Access Publication Fund and agreements with publishers.

Another option is secondary publication, where the publication does not initially appear freely accessible and is only subsequently made available under Open Access conditions. The Sherpa Romeo database offers authors the opportunity to look up the licence conditions of many publishers and to check whether and under what conditions secondary publication is permitted, e.g. on an institutional repository.

Our repository OPUS Passau offers all members of the university the opportunity to publish their scientific work free of charge as primary or secondary publication.