University Library

Open Access Agreements of the University Library

The academic publishing system is undergoing a transition – a transformation – to open access. One of the key measures for this is moving away from the traditional subscription model, where libraries pay for access to scholarly publications. As a result, libraries are entering into so-called transformative agreements with publishers. A transformative agreement typically consists of two components: All authors affiliated with a participating institution have the opportunity to publish their scholarly articles immediately as open access. Participating institutions and their users also gain reading access to the publisher’s content, even if it is (still) behind a paywall.

In recent years, the definition of transformative agreements has become somewhat more flexible as a variety of models have been introduced. For example, there are now models where publications appear as open access but only after a six-month embargo (e.g., Rockefeller University Press) or where reading access is only available for journals in combination with another subscription (e.g., Taylor & Francis).

Here’s a tip for you as an author: Have you written a scientific article primarily as part of your research work at RPTU (employment contract) and are also the corresponding author? Then you can use journal titles from a total of twelve agreements for your open access publication.

  • AIP Publishing
  • Elsevier
  • Frontiers*
  • Hogrefe
  • IOP Publishing
  • Nature-Zeitschriften

 

  • PLOS
  • Rockefeller University Press
  • Springer
  • Taylor & Francis
  • Wiley
  • wt Werkstattstechnik online

Through dashboards and reports, the open access team verifies the affiliation of authors with RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau. Currently, the library covers the costs for publications in hybrid journals. Information about cost coverage or funding opportunities for articles in gold open access journals can be found on our website. The application form for financial support for open access publications is available here.

When submitting your article, please choose the CC-BY license if possible. The selection of licenses with the NC attribute (Non-Commercial), such as CC-BY-NC, is not recommended as these are considered too restrictive and limit the free reuse of publications.

 

* Passing on costs to authors