Open Access describes the free access to academic literature and other materials on the internet. Publishing an academic paper under Open Access conditions grants everyone permission to read, download, save, link and print the text and use it free of charge. Further, through open licenses, additional rights may be granted, which permit free subsequent use, copying, distribution and also modification of the document.
The Max Planck Society, as initiator of the “Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities”, committed itself early on to the principles of Open Access. You can find more detailed information on Open Access in the Max Planck Society here.
The following services provide an initial step into the field of Open Access publications. This is only a small selection of offerings. You will find more extensive information on Open Access and subject-specific content on the information site open-access.net.
OAIster allows searches for many millions of electronic documents, which are archived under Open Access criteria for usage on document servers. OAIster harvests the publications on these document servers.
OAIster was developed at the University of Michigan in 2002 and since 2009 has been further developed and managed in cooperation with OCLC.
Link: OAIster
DissOnline allows searches for online dissertations and post-doctoral theses (Habilitationen), which are listed, archived and accessible through the German and Swiss national libraries.
In addition to this, detailed technical and juristic information surrounding the topic of the online publication of university works is available here.
Link: dissOnline
SSRN works together with over 700 international academic journals and research institutions. Abstracts of not yet published academic articles or research results may be viewed here.
In addition to abstracts, in many cases access to electronic full texts is also available.
Link: SSRN – Social Science Research Network
PubMan serves the publishing and administration of publication data in the area of research and service, and thereby covers traditional publication types, grey literature as well as supplementary material. It is an offering of the Max Planck Society (MPS) for all current (permanent and temporary) and former MPS employees in order to
• increase visibility, access and subsequent usage of publications of employees in accordance with Open Access criteria
• support scholars and Institutes with verification and reporting tasks
• ensure the long-term backup of publication data
PubMan is an application based on the MPS’s eSciDoc infrastructure. Its modular construction makes possible further development of its functionality, in particular regarding national and international standardisation work as well as integration with other systems both within and outside the MPS. Publication data published via PubMan can and should be used by other MPS internal and external systems.
