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Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen
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Initiatives to support publishing

The SUB Göttingen supports various initiatives, infrastructures and services in the field of publishing and Open Access.

Publication-Promoting Initiatives

On behalf of Georg August University Göttingen (including Göttingen University Medical Centre), SUB Göttingen supports various initiatives and infrastructures that encourage open access publishing. In this section you will find an overview of these activities.

Current Initiatives

Period: 2026-2028

B!SON is a recommendation service for quality-assured open access journals. The abbreviation stands for ‘Bibliometric and Semantic Open Access Recommender Network’. The service was developed as part of a project by the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) and the SLUB Dresden. B!SON compiles a list of suitable journals sorted by thematic relevance from the large number of available open access journals. In addition to common bibliometric methods of similarity determination, machine learning methods are used to identify relevant publication locations based on the semantic similarity of the title or abstract of an article to be published.
Authors can search for a thematically suitable open access journal using the title, abstract and references of their manuscript. The Göttingen State and University Library has a local instance in which the existing publishing agreements are stored, so that the journals are additionally provided with funding information.

Status: January 2026

Period: 2026

The SUB Göttingen supports the Bloomsbury Open Collections initiative. If the target funding amount is reached, twenty titles per subject package will be published in Open Access. If the target funding amount is not reached, but at least 50% is reached, ten titles will be published in Open Access, while the supporting institutions will receive permanent access to the ten non-transformed titles.

The following subject packages are supported:

  • African Studies & International Development
  • Environment & Climate Change
  • Gender & Sexuality

Status: January 2026

Period: 2025-2027

The SUB Göttingen participates in a framework agreement in which nine books per module are published in Open Access. The contract covers the following thematic modules

  • German linguistics
  • German literary studies
  • History

From a pool of predetermined series and relevant individual titles, the participants in the framework agreement make a selection of the titles that will be purchased freely.

Status: January 2026

Period: 2026-2028

The Millennium-Studies are one of De Gruyter Brill's most renowned series on classical studies, publishing relevant research contributions from key areas of classical studies. The consortium enables the direct open access publication of an average of six new titles per year from the series.

Status: January 2026

Period: 2024-2026

The SUB Göttingen is a member of the DOAB and the OAPEN Foundation. The DOAB lists open access books that have undergone a peer review process as well as open access book publishers and increases their visibility. The OAPEN Library lists freely accessible academic books and offers services for libraries, publishers and research funders.

Status: January 2026

Period: 2026-2028

The SUB Göttingen is a member of the DOAJ. The independent database contains over 22,000 peer-reviewed journals from all fields of science. The journals are pure Open Access journals (golden Open Access), which are eligible for funding via the local publication fund of the University of Göttingen (incl. UMG).

Status: January 2026

The SUB Göttingen supports various initiatives of Duncker & Humblot.

Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung - Beihefte (period: 2025-2027)

With the ZHF Beihefte, the SUB Göttingen supports one of the most renowned historical research series. As part of a consortium, the backlist of 59 titles is purchased free of charge and an average of one new publication per year is published directly in Open Access.

 

Open Law (period: 2026)

The SUB Göttingen supports the Open Law initiative of the publisher Duncker & Humblot. As part of a consortium, the first volumes of the following series will be published in Open Access in 2026:

Updated: January 2026

Period: 2026-2027

Five journals in the fields of adult education, vocational education, historical education research, language education research and comparative education are supported in their publication by Diamond Open Access: 

Status: January 2026

Period: 2025-2027 or 2026-2028

Participation in the KOALA contracts supports the provision of the following journals in Diamond Open Access:

The costs of the publication process are covered by institutional memberships. Authors can publish free of charge in these journals, and the content is then also available free of charge in open access.

Status: January 2026

Period: 2024-2026

Language Science Press is a scholar-led, digital open access publisher for linguistics. The SUB Göttingen supports LSP through a fee-based institutional membership, which covers the costs of the publication process.

Status: January 2026

Period: 2025-2027

The SUB Göttingen supports the Direct to Open Initiative of the publisher MIT Press. All new publications from the year 2025 will be published in Open Access, a total of around 80 books. The following two subject packages are supported:

  • HSS (Humanities and Social Sciences)
  • STEAM Collection (STEM + art and design)

Status: January 2026

Period: 2024-2026

The next ten volumes in the Internet und Gesellschaft series (publication years 2024 to approx. 2026) will be published in open access. Publishing is free of charge for the authors; funding is provided by the participating institutions in the consortium and the Fachinformationsdienst für Internationale und Interdisziplinäre Rechtsforschung.

Status: January 2026

Period: 2025-2026

Founded in 2008, OBP is already the largest independent academic open access publisher of monographs in the UK and one of the leading publishers in the English-speaking world. OBP is a not-for-profit social enterprise run by academics who are committed to making high-quality, award-winning research accessible to all. Libraries support OBP's open access publishing and activities.

Status: January 2026

Period: 2024-2026

Participation in the Open Library Economics ejournals framework agreement supports the provision of the following journals in Diamond Open Access:

The costs of the publication process are covered by institutional memberships. Authors can publish free of charge in these journals, and the content is then also available free of charge in open access.

Status: January 2026

Period: February 2025 - February 2026

The non-profit organization OLH was founded in 2013 as a network of scientists, librarians, programmers and publishers and, as a scientifically managed open access publisher with high quality standards, does not charge author fees. The costs are covered by international library consortia.

Status: March 2025

Period: 2025

Peer Community in is a non-profit and non-commercial scientific organization that aims to recommend peer-reviewed articles and reports published on preprint servers and other open access repositories free of charge. The organization is divided into thematic communities called Peer Community in X, e.g. Peer Community in Evolutionary Biology or PCI Ecology. PCI also publishes a diamond open access journal, the Peer Community Journal, in which all recommended articles can be published if the authors so wish.

Status: May 2025

Period: 2025

The SciPost platform was launched in 2016 and is run by scientists. Quality and openness are the top priorities. The journal portfolio now includes the fields of astronomy, biology, chemistry, mathematics, physics and political science. Publishing in the open access journals offered is free of charge for publishers. This service and the operation of the platform are financed by sponsors and memberships.

Status: March 2025

Period: 2025-2027

The Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics - German Universities is the national contact point for organizing the financial participation of German universities in the international consortium SCOAP³. The aim of SCOAP³ is to make scientific publications in the field of high-energy physics available in Open Access. The contribution payments of the participating institutions correspond to the proportionate publication volume of their scientists.

Status: January 2026

Period: 2024-2026

The SUB Göttingen supports the platform The Programming Historian through a membership. The platform provides beginner-friendly, peer-reviewed tutorials. These are intended to support humanities scholars in learning a wide range of digital tools, techniques and workflows to facilitate research and teaching.

The contributions are available to all interested parties free of charge and are provided under a CC BY license. There are also no fees for writing and revising the contributions. This page provides an overview of the contribution options.

Status: January 2026

Period: 2022 - 2027

The SUB Göttingen supports the Open Library Media Studies of the publisher Transcript, in which new publications of the program area Media Studies are made available in Open Access. After successful crowdfunding, the contents of the package are available to the entire scientific community free of charge under a Creative Commons license for free use. Publication in the Open Library Media Studies is free of charge for the authors.

Status:  January 2026

Period: 2024-2026

The Verfassungsblog is a quality-assured academic blog that is firmly anchored in the legal and political science community. It sees itself as an interface between academic discourse on the one hand and the political public on the other. The sponsoring institutions support the maintenance and further development of the blog's (technical) infrastructure.

Status: January 2026

Blick von oben auf einen offenen Laptop SUB Göttingen, Christoph Mischke

Newsletter Publishing

Everything about publishing: Open Science, Open Access, funding options and events.


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Subscribe to Open (S2O)

Some publishers offer a subscribe to open (S2O) model for some of their journals. An entire journal volume is published in open access if a predefined threshold of subscriptions is reached. If the S2O model is successfully implemented, authors publish Open Access in these journals at no additional cost.

The subscription threshold for the following journals, serials and packages were reached in 2025:

Current S2O Journals

The S2O model will be successfully implemented for the following titles in 2025:

Status: April 2025

The following applies to publishing in all of the publisher's journals: Members of the University of Göttingen (incl. UMG) have the opportunity to publish their articles Open Access via the "Subscribe to Open Agreement". The costs are covered by central funding.

Status: March 2025

The S2O model will be successfully implemented in 2025 for the journals in the title list.

Status: May 2025

The S2O model will be successfully implemented for the following titles in 2025:

Status: April 2025

The S2O model will be successfully implemented in 2025 for journals stored in the title list:

Status: April 2025

The S2O model will be successfully implemented for the following titles in 2025:

Status: April 2025

The S2O model will be successfully implemented for the following titles in 2025:

Status: April 2025

The S2O model will be successfully implemented for the following titles in 2025:

Status: May 2025

The S2O model will be successfully implemented for the following titles in 2025:

Status: May 2025

The S2O model will be successfully implemented for the following titles in 2025:

Status: May 2025

Open Access

Questions about the forms of Open Access and the activities of the SUB Göttingen?


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Schriftzug Open Access, im Hintergrund unscharfe Netzwerkverbindungen SUB Göttingen/MikeAMorrison, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

FAQ - Publication-Promoting Initiatives

The APC is a fee that publishers have to pay for the open access provision of their articles in journals.

Other terms for APCs are "author fees", "article fees", "article publication charges", "article publication fees", "article processing fees" or "APF".

Publishers are required to refer to the support provided by the Publication Fund. You can use the following wording: "We acknowledge support by the Open Access Agreement of the Göttingen University."

For Gold Open Access article costs over 2,000 euros (gross), costs are split with the corresponding author's institution. If it is not possible to cover a proportion of the costs, funding from the Publication Fund must also be rejected.

Publish & Read contracts are a contractual model in which the license fees for read access to the content of journals that are not freely accessible are offset against the open access publication charges (APC). This prevents the fees for the provision of content from being paid twice. These contracts form the basis for the exception for publishing in hybrid open access journals.

Research Organization Registry (ROR) is a community-managed database designed to provide a persistent identifier for every research organization in the world. It complements other commonly used identifiers such as ORCID for scientists and DOI for research results and scientific online publications.

A Ringgold Identifier (Ringgold ID or RIN) is a permanent numeric identifier (persistent identifier) for organizations in the scientific community. The Ringgold Identify Database contains almost 600,000 organizations in various scientific sectors, including universities, companies, hospitals and government agencies.

  • Ringgold ID of the University of Göttingen: 9375
  • Ringgold ID of the University Medical Center Göttingen: 84922

The instrument currently attracting the most attention and having the greatest open access effects are transformation contracts, under which part of the content of subscription journals is converted to open access and the expectation is that the rate will gradually rise to 100%. The German DEAL project with Wiley, Springer and Elsevier also belongs in the field of transformation contracts. The hope is that this will cross a critical threshold above which publishers will convert their portfolios completely to open access.

Contact

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