Open Access Publishing

As the creator of a work, an author owns all the rights to that work. By signing a publishing contract or a copyright transfer agreement, the author usually grants the publisher the exclusive and sole right to use the scholarly publication. This means that the right of use is transferred to the publisher, which usually prevents the original PDF of the publication from being made publicly available on a website or in a repository. With some publishers it is possible to obtain a secondary publication right in an addendum to the contract or to agree a reasonable embargo period. The SHERPA/RoMEO list provides information on the conditions under which self-archiving or secondary publication is permitted, and for which publishers.

If you require legal advice on individual agreements with publishers, please contact the Organizational Unit for Law and Risk Management.

Funding at the Medical University of Graz

Funding for Open Access publications is only available to members of the Medical University of Graz who are first or corresponding authors. Currently there are two models:

1. Funding through publishing agreements, where the library not only covers the subscription costs but also makes special arrangements for more cost-effective OA publishing.
2. The OA publication fees are paid by the Organizational Unit for Research Management.

External funding

Open Access funding within the framework of research projects and their initiatives is subject to the respective regulations: FWF, FFG, EU. Useful information on Open Access funding can also be found on the uniko website.

The Open Access Programme for ‘Refereed Publications’ is now fully implemented by the Open Access Coordination of the University Library for all projects.

For an application to be approved, the conditions for FWF funding must be met.

Please send all inquiries regarding FWF funding for Open Access publications to openaccess(at)medunigraz.at.

Open content and open access licenses provide information about how publications can be freely used and/or distributed under copyright. Usually when a publication appears in an OA journal or is uploaded to a repository, the appropriate license is assigned and marked.

Creative Commons copyright licenses are currently the most widely used in the German-speaking world and are either specified by publishers or chosen by authors.

To provide scientists with the best possible support, the Medical University of Graz has concluded so-called Open Access Publishing Contracts. These agreements cover subscription journals with an Open Access option (hybrid journals). In all agreements, authors do not have to pay any costs for Open Access publications.

Within the framework of these publishing agreements, members of the Medical University of Graz can publish in more than 5,000 journals by Springer, Elsevier, Wiley, Oxford, Karger, Nature and Thieme free of charge and without administrative effort. The agreements are financed by the library or as start-up financing from project funds.

There is no need to submit a separate funding application for an OA publication in any of the five publishers’ journals. The agreements are designed to avoid ‘double dipping’ (payment for subscription and open access publication). The cost coverage applies only to Open Access and not to other charges such as color charges and the like.

The following conditions must be met for Open Access publications:

• Your article has been accepted by a journal included in the above-mentioned cooperation agreements.
• You are a member of the Medical University of Graz.
• You are the corresponding author.
• Your article falls into the categories Original Paper or Review Paper.
• You agree to open access publication.

Please use only your institutional e-mail address of the Medical University of Graz for the submission.

Open access journals offer researchers the opportunity to raise their profile using new systems of scholarly communication. Unfortunately, many OA publishers do not meet university quality standards, and some try to obtain valuable content through spam e-mails.

You should therefore check that

• The journal has an impact factor in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). Please note that there are many journals with fictitious impact factors on the internet.
• The journal is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
• The journal meets the following additional criteria.

If you still have doubts about the quality of a journal or the reliability of the publisher, please contact the library's OA coordinator.