B!SON Recommender Service for Open Access Journals

• Journal Finder

B!SON is the acronym for 'Bibliometric and Semantic Open Access Recommender Network'. The service—developed by the TIB Hannover and the SLUB Dresden—is intended to facilitate a successful open access transformation. The poject partners cooperate with OpenCitations and DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), all recommended journals are gold open access journals.

The Journal Finder offers a selection of possible journals, but all results should in every case be double checked on the resp. journals’ websites or with the open access office, as there are a (growing) number of different pricing tiers, financing options and procedures.

Find more info on the service at B!SON Project.

The following info was prepared by the DEAL consortium (https://deal-konsortium.de/en/why-ccby) and is intended to help clarify why CC BY is the best choice for your open access license.

This is why CC BY is the best choice

Legal clarity

CC BY provides clear and straightforward terms, reducing legal uncertainties and ensuring your work can be freely used and shared across various platforms and by diverse audiences.

Maximized reuse and dissemination

CC BY allows others to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you. This maximizes the reach and impact of your research.

Equal commercial use for all

Yes, CC BY does allow for commercial use, but it does so equally for everyone. And given that non-commercial is often interpreted extremely narrow, to the extent that posting a NC-licensed article on a website with advertising can be considered a breach of the NC license terms, it is important to allow it. While this might initially seem daunting, it actually serves as the best protection against exploitation by individual players. When everyone has the same rights to use your work commercially, it prevents any single entity from monopolizing or unfairly profiting from it—addressing current concerns, such as those related to AI.

Alignment with key open-access statements

CC BY steht im Einklang mit den wichtigsten Open-Access-Erklärungen, wie der Berliner Erklärung über offenen Zugang. Sie ist auch die bevorzugte Lizenz vieler Forschungsförderer und -organisationen weltweit.

The Problem with „NC” - Non-commercial

Legal uncertainty

The definition of "non-commercial" is ambiguous under German law. This leads to considerable legal uncertainty as to whether the respective use is permitted. Very often, uses are excluded that the author does not actually want to prevent. For example, it is unclear whether and in which cases NC material can be used in collaborative projects between public and private research institutions. Use by freelance professionals such as doctors, lawyers, architects or even independent research by individuals is clearly not permitted if it serves commercial purposes. In light of these considerations, it becomes evident that NC licenses impede a multitude of desirable uses, thereby contradicting the fundamental tenet of open access.

Exclusive commercial rights to publishers

While choosing a "non-commercial" license type excludes commercial uses, publishers usually require you to assign those reserved commercial rights to them. Unfortunately, many publishers typically claim these rights exclusively, limiting your control over your own work.

Commercial exploitation by publishers

Once publishers hold (exclusive) commercial rights, they can commercialize your research, including licensing it to AI companies or other commercial entities (including for commercial use), without your consent and without any revenue sharing.

Not compatibile with open access definitions

NC licensed material is not “Open Access” per definition. The “Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge  in the Sciences and Humanities” requires Open Access works to be licensed “for any responsible purpose”. Commercial use of research is, obviously, a reasonable purpose in this regard.

Open access publishing in scientific journals often entails costs for the author, so-called "article-processing charges" (APC) or "publication fees". We have a number of agreements with publishers to facilitate the publishing process or reduce APC:

• Info on Open Access Publishers

As the number of different publishing models, pricing categories and procedures is constantly increasing, we advise you to contact us before submitting a publication „when in doubt”.

OOPS, the Oldenburg Online Publication Server, offers Oldenburg University faculty a quick and simple procedure for publishing their scientific papers online.

OOPS also allows undergraduates, postgraduate and post-doc students to publish their final thesis (BA, MA, doctoral or habilitation thesis) online.

• Publishing on OOPS

The publication software Open Journal Systems (OJS) of the Public Knowledge Project helps Oldenburg scientists and scholars to publish scientific journals through the university press. The university library operates OJS for the university.

OJS is an important element of the university's Open-Access activities. The BIS and the university press "BIS-Verlag" support you when planning and setting up journals in OJS (e.g. ISSN and DOI assignment).

Online since March 2018:

• Beiträge zur mediävistischen Erzählforschung
• Journal of Open, Distance, and Digital Education

The OpenAPC Initiative make open access publishing fees transparent that were paid for by universities and other research institutions. OpenAPC ist part of the INTACT project with the aim of creating transparent and efficient workflows to monitor and control open access publishing costs.

• openAPC-Oldenburg

The publication management team is your point of contact for the publication of your doctoral thesis or habilitation thesis. Please, contact them before handing in your document.
Bachelor and Master theses may be published on OOPS, the Oldenburg Online-Publications-Server

• Additional info

Open Access Policy of the
Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg

The Carl von Ossietzky University supports the “Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities” and advises its scientists and scholars to make their research results, as represented in their publications, comfortably and without financial barriers available where possible.

For authors open access publishing stands for a greater visibility of their scientific or scholarly work. For researchers, teaching staff and students worldwide it facilitates participation in the exchange of information and knowledge–regardless of their financial situation or location.

Consequently, the Presidential Chair advises scientists and scholars of the Carl von Ossietzky University to archive or publish their scientific publications

• as pre-print or post-print on a subject repository or
• on OOPS, the Carl von Ossietzky University’s institutional repository or
• in peer-reviewed open access journals, and
• in contracts with publishers to retain their right to publish or archive their research results electronically.

Freedom of research and teaching are preserved. Discipline-specific conventions as well as the rights of publishers are to be respected.

(Decision of the Presidential Chair 65/15, 14 April 2015)

The so-called secondary-publication right (Zweitveröffentlichungsrecht, § 38(4) German UrhG) allows authors to make the manuscripts of their publications in scientific/scholarly journals freely available on the internet under certain conditions one year after the primary publication. The current understanding is that this applies to articles published after the regulation came into effect in January 2014.