
Open Access
The Leibniz Association signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities as early as 2003, along with other large scientific organisations, and committed itself to actively supporting and promoting the open access model. Other important milestones include setting up the Open Access Working Group in September 2005, approving the first Open Access Guidelines in 2007 and the current Open Access Policy valid since 2016.
Tried and tested principles for quality assurance, especially peer review processes, are applied in full in the context of digital open access publishing. For this reason, in 2018, the Leibniz Association developed a leaflet on predatory academic publishing to inform people about the extent of predatory publishing and the necessary safeguards.
The Leibniz Association promotes open access in the political arena too, e.g. as part of the Digitality in Science priority of the Alliance of Science Organisations in Germany, and at European level in the context of Science Europe, the main association of European research funding organisations and non-university research institutions.
In addition, many Leibniz Institutes act as publishers or service providers for open access journals or run specialist repositories that provide open access to specialist literature.
Leibniz Open Access Publishing Fund
The Leibniz Open Access Publishing Fund supports open access publication of academic monographs.