The German Research Foundation (DFG) has granted the TU Ilmenau about 200,000 euros over three years to expand its open access services. This will make more of the university's research results available worldwide free of charge.From 2015 to 2020, TU Ilmenau already received funding from Germany's largest funding body to make its scientific publications freely accessible as open access publications. Now, as the first university in Thuringia, the university has again been able to acquire funding from the DFG, which it will use to further develop the program from 2022 to 2024.
The buzzword for the contemporary form of scientific publishing is open access. When scientific publications are accessible free of charge at any time and any place without legal and technical hurdles, this not only benefits the scientists whose research results are published with the widest possible reach. Open access also simplifies and accelerates scientific exchange and creates free access to the results of mostly publicly funded research.
However, as beneficial as open access is for the general public, its development is being held back by the major global scientific publishers. If researchers want to publish an essay or an entire book freely accessible with them, many publishers charge high fees or do not allow free online access to the publications in the first place. For this reason, many universities, including the TU Ilmenau, have set up their own publication funds to provide financial support for their researchers. In this way, 149 scientific publications have already received financial support since the first DFG funding in 2015.
In 2020, after six years, the TU Ilmenau reached the maximum funding period of the predecessor program and last year applied for the new "Open Access Publication Costs" program launched by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. With this program, the DFG aims to give universities planning security by enabling them to control and regulate their payments to scientific publishers over the long term. In its application to the DFG, the Ilmenau University Library presented a well-balanced concept for such central control processes, which is consistently geared towards high benefits for research and integrates all the university departments involved. The concept completely convinced the review panel, and the DFG granted the TU Ilmenau more than 200,000 euros to further develop its Open Access services over the next three years.
This is good news not only for research at the university, which can thus further increase the dissemination of its research results. Dhe worldwide free availability of quality-assured specialist publications also means opening up science to all - an imperative in times of increasing demand for scientifically validated information.
Further information: www.tu-ilmenau.de/open-access
Contact
Dr. Peter Blume
Ilmenau University Library
+49 3677 69-4776
peter.blume@tu-ilmenau.de
