As described in the 2010 WZB Open Access Guideline, the WZB strongly advocates and supports the publication of research findings by its own researchers, and publicly funded researchers in general, in digital and freely accessible form.

The Research Information Unit coordinates the activities of the WZB in the area of Open Access. The Open Access service was established in 2014 with the OA 1000+ project and was very successfully managed by Alessandro Blasetti as Open Access Advisor in the following years. Since 2023, an Open Access team has taken over the various services.

Information and advice

All WZB researchers are welcome to take advantage of our customized individual advising services on various aspects of Open Access publishing. For more information, please contact the Open Access Team.

Prior to an advising session on the possibilities of Open Access publishing in scientific journals, we recommend you look at our overview of the various OA options for journal articles by WZB researchers. WZB researchers enjoy currently special conditions for many journals of these seven publishers: Cambridge University Press, Emerald, Elsevier, Sage, Springer, Taylor & Francis (Routledge),  and Wiley.

Basic information about Open Access is available on our webpage “About OA”.

Publishing services

We make sure that all OA publications by WZB researchers are disseminated, made permanently accessible, and referenced in relevant central repositories embedded in various online search environments. As a result, research results become even more visible.

Our comprehensive Green OA Service gives all WZB researchers the opportunity to ensure free public access and increased visibility even for those publications (especially recent peer-reviewed journal articles) that were first published in conventional form and were not freely accessible immediately upon publication. This type of OA is often called Green OA.

The first major success of our practice in this area was the OA 1000+ project, completed in late 2015. In that project, 1,520 older publications by current and former WZB researchers were digitalized and made freely and permanently accessible on the Internet.

Networking and cooperation