Preamble

The Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel (HAB) is a non-university research and study centre focusing on European cultural history of the medieval and early modern periods. In terms of their scope and depth, the library’s historical holdings comprise a unique archive of Western culture. Manuscripts, incunabula, printed works and collections offer researchers the opportunity to explore European bodies of knowledge in their global contexts. The HAB is also one of Lower Saxony’s three state libraries, and, as such, it appreciates its special obligation to preserve knowledge while making it freely available to others.

As a signatory to the 2003 Berlin Declaration, the HAB supports and practises open access to scholarly information as formulated there and in the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme. In order to provide the best possible access to its holdings and research and make these available to be reused in innovative ways, the HAB ensures that the publication of digitised copies of its holdings, metadata and research results is as free as possible from financial, technical and legal barriers. In doing so, it supports researchers, individuals working in the cultural sphere and interested members of the public, enabling them to access and process information while promoting new research methods and results as well as the creation of free areas of knowledge.

The HAB’s Open Access guidelines supplement the library’s guidelines for ensuring good scholarly practice and its research data guidelines.

Definition

Drawing upon the definition offered by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation, DFG), Open Access is understood as free access to scholarly publications and other materials on the Internet. Any person can read, download, save, link and print a scholarly document published under Open Access conditions and use it free of charge. The prerequisite for this is a legally secure and pro-research licence such as Creative Commons (CC).

Principles

1. The HAB asks its staff and users to publish their scholarly publications in an Open Access format. It recommends that their research findings, research data and metadata be made available as Open Access publications under an open licence (CC-BY, for example).
2. The HAB encourages users and staff to retain the right to further use of their works when concluding publishing contracts and to transfer only simple usage rights.
3. The HAB advocates the exercise of secondary publication rights and the parallel publication of copies of published work in the HAB’s Open Access repository or, where appropriate, in other equivalent Open Access repositories.
4. As long as quality can be maintained, purely Open Access publications are preferable to those that make only part of the information freely accessible.
5. The HAB asks its staff and users to play an active role in transforming the publication system into one that is openly accessible. It encourages them to evaluate their own reviewing, editing and publishing activities accordingly. It asks its users and staff to utilise their own position to advocate for Open Access transformation in publishing houses and specialist associations. A commitment to non-commercial offerings is highly recommended.

Implementation

The HAB supports its staff, users and partner institutions in Open Access publishing and is dedicated to moving scholarly publishing towards an Open Access system. To help implement these goals, the HAB offers the following:

1. Advice on Open Access publishing provided by the Open Access Officer, the HAB’s publishing house and the project office
2. Support for Open Access agreements with external publishers
3. Provision of an institutional full-text repository
4. Provision of an Open Access publication fund
5. Quality assurance for Open Access publications by means of established peer review
6. Publication of in-house digital copies in the public domain (CC-0)
7. Cooperation in Lower Saxony, Germany and beyond in the context of Open Access programmes, calls for proposals and cooperative projects

Title image: Saint Peter Hands over a Letter (woodcut, 1551–1575). Form cutter: unknown. HAB: http://diglib.hab.de?grafik=graph-res-c-162-6 (public domain)