Open Access, publishing & managing research data

Open access publishing enables anyone to read scientific literature online. The most widely used definition is provided in the Budapest Declaration from 2002.

The aim of open access is to give everyone an unrestricted inroad to scientific literature and make it usable by others – free of charge and with minimal technical and legal barriers.

Literature published as open access is quickly and easily available for free. It is accessible to more people than it would be for a monetary cost, which broadens its reception and leads to more frequent citations.

In principle, there are two different forms – gold open access and green open access.

Gold open access publications appear in an open access journal that provides content free of charge. To ensure that these journals nonetheless maintain a high standard, in most cases a publication fee is charged for submitting an article. This is normally borne by the authors. However, funds are available for this purpose at Kempten University of Applied Sciences. Please contact us if you have any questions.

Of course, you can also use OPUS to publish documents for the first time as open access, which won’t cost you anything. Your work will be openly accessible to readers all over the world, stored long-term at a fixed URL.

Green open access acts as a second or tandem publication – at Kempten University of Applied Sciences, our OPUS publication server is the repository. To post your work on this platform, you must own the rights to re-publish it. Check your contract with the publisher, and if you are at all unsure, please consult us.

Feel free to email us at: opus(at)hs-kempten.de

You can find further details about open access at open-access.network

Works that have already been published elsewhere can be posted again online on OPUS as a re-publication, subject to ownership rights.

Please contact us if you wish to re-publish your papers on OPUS.

OPUS is the official repository at Kempten University of Applied Sciences. It serves as our…

• University bibliography: Listing all scientific publications that have been produced at or by members of Kempten University of Applied Sciences. The bibliographic information for these publications is stored in OPUS.

• Publications server: There is also the option of providing free access to publications online, i.e. full text (= open access publication).
  • Previously unpublished scientific articles can be presented for first publication online on OPUS, free of charge.
  • Works that have already been published elsewhere can be posted again online on OPUS as a re-publication, subject to ownership rights.

• Research monitor: All scientific publications produced at Kempten University of Applied Sciences are listed under key fields of research.

• Research records: Researchers at Kempten University of Applied Sciences can use OPUS to offer other researchers at the university – and worldwide – access to the results of their research.

Publishing work on OPUS makes documents accessible electronically worldwide – allowing reliable referencing to a consistent and stable site.

• Full texts can only be posted if you own the rights. If your work has already been adopted by a publisher, then you are obliged to clarify the legal situation unequivocally. Please consult us if you have any doubts.
• If you don’t own the necessary rights to publish the full text of your work, you can post the bibliographic details on OPUS.
• For all full-text publications, we require a signed declaration of consent from all co-authors. Please send this to the library either by email to schulung(at)hs-kempten.de or via regular/internal post.
• Students’ final theses are only published as full text; bibliographical details alone are not published. In addition, theses need to be good or excellent works, which the supervisor has recommended for publication.

If you have any questions about publishing on OPUS, please get in touch.

Research data is generated by scientific activity, such as digitalisation, researching sources, experiments, measurements, surveys, or questionnaires.

Research data management (RDM) encompasses any measures and procedures undertaken to organise research data by methodical, conceptual and technical means throughout its digital lifecycle and beyond. This therefore includes creating, processing, enhancing, publishing and archiving data.

RDM is part of scientific good practice. Sponsors of publications, but also publishing houses and scientific journals, increasingly require accumulated data to be made available for subsequent use. Research data management measures and procedures can be recorded in a data management plan.

Researchers can save their work in research data repositories. If inter-regional repositories exist for your discipline, these are the advised option for safekeeping. Otherwise, we recommend the online storage service zenodo.

Any questions? Please feel free to get in touch.