Green Road

"Green Road" means publishing on professional or institutional document servers (repositories). Works that have already been published or are due for conventional publication are published in parallel on these. This is permitted by a large number of scientific publishers. However, all authors must clarify this in advance with the first publisher.

Gold Road

In the case of the "Gold Road", the publication is published in a pure OA journal or book. Like conventional journals, OA journals are published by scientific publishers and are subject to a peer review process. The same applies to OA books.

The difference is in the financing: Conventional publishers sell their content for readers to pay for, while in the OA model the authors and/or the institutions they are affiliated to are charged. This means that the publications are freely available to everyone.

Caveat: Hybrid Open Access

Hybrid Open Access means that authors “buy” their own articles or book contributions in a paid publication with an often high publication fee so that everyone can access them. The rest of the publication remains locked. In this way, access to scientific information is paid twice (further necessary subscriptions and extra publication fees). This model is therefore very controversial.

The exception here are so-called Read and Publish agreements with publishers. This means that universities continue to have access to a publisher's range of journals and at the same time have the option of publishing Open Access in it free of charge.

Open Access policies and funding

ZHAW Open Access Policy

In 2015, the ZHAW Executive Board adopted an OA policy. In this policy, the ZHAW commits to making its research findings intended for publication freely accessible to the public according to the principles of Open Access. ZHAW members are encouraged to publish a version of their publications in the institutional repository ZHAW digitalcollection. Primary OA publications are endorsed by the ZHAW and supported through measures by the University Library.

Open Access publishing

The University Library provides advice for selecting the appropriate Open Access option for your publication project and offers financial support for Open Access publications.

How and where to publish in a gold Open Access journal?

Basically, gold OA publication platforms have the same requirements, such as reliability and evaluation in a discipline-specific database as conventional journals and publishers. We can advise you on the selection.

The University Library supports ZHAW researchers with funding for gold OA publishing through a publication fund. Nowadays, there are also many renowned specialised journals or book publishers that do not charge publishing fees. In order to receive financial support for publishing, the submitted publication must comply with the ZHAW Guidelines on funding open access publications.

How and where can I benefit from Read and Publish agreements?

The Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries negotiates so-called Read and Publish agreements in accordance with the national OA strategy.

The University Library provides financial support to ZHAW researchers to publish in journals from these publishers within the framework of the Read and Publish agreements.

​​​​​​​How am I supported as an editor?

Diamond Open Access refers to publications that can be read free of charge by all interested parties worldwide and for which the authors do not incur any costs. The ZHAW University Library provides advisory and financial support to editors who wish to transfer their journal or book series into a Diamond Open Access model.

Open Access searches

Search for freely accessible scientific full texts, so-called Open Access publications, in our ZHAW swisscovery search portal or on other platforms.

BASE

BASE is the key search engine for thousands of repositories worldwide. You can access full texts of the majority of indexed documents for free.

DOAB

The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), published by the OEPAN Foundation, is a freely accessible online catalogue of OA book publications with an academically recognised level of quality.

DOAJ

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a directory of e-journals that are freely available on the internet in accordance with the principles of Open Access. It includes peer-reviewed academic journals that are available online for free to readers immediately upon publication. For some of the journals it is also possible to search for individual articles.

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is the largest search engine for academic resources. Here, you will find articles that are available as full text on a subscription basis as well as numerous OA resources.

Open Access Helper

Open Access Helper is a browser extension for Safari, Chrome and Firefox with which you can automatically search for freely available articles on websites. The browser extension is easy to use and configure. By integrating third-party services, it offers additional features, such as the option to search for similar articles. 

OSF Preprints

The OSF Preprint Server is held by the Center for Open Science (COS), a nonprofit organization. The plattform aggregates search results from a variety of other preprint providers such like arXiv, PsyArXiv, SocArXiv and more.