Open-access agreements with publishers and initiatives
Looking to publish open access in a periodical that charges fees for the privilege? Find out here what financial support is available from the University of Bonn.
What are "agreements"?
You as an author are often faced with very high fees for individual publications. With this in mind, the University of Bonn has signed agreements / contracts with various publishers and organizations that allow you to publish for free on an open-access basis or give you discounts on your publication fees (APCs). In so doing, we are supporting the ongoing transformation toward open access. Take a look at what we can offer in terms of covering the costs for the following publishers and organizations.
Wiley, Springer Nature, and Elsevier
Interested in getting one of these publishers to publish your work? Then have a read about the DEAL project.
All agreements
Articles/periodicals
Humanities and social sciences
Articles/periodicals
Geosciences, engineering sciences, life sciences
Books/monographs
German language and literature, history
Articles/periodicals
HSS, cultural studies, economics
Articles/periodicals
All subjects/disciplines
Books/monographs
Educational science and research
Books/monographs
Anthropology, communication studies, etc.
Articles/periodicals
Linguistics, theology, philosophy, etc.
All publication types
Social sciences
Books/monographs
Linguistics
Books (publication series)
Ancient history
Books/monographs
Law, digital law
Books/monographs
Primarily humanities and social sciences
Articles/periodicals
Humanities and social sciences
Articles/periodicals
Natural and life sciences
Articles/periodicals
Psychology, psychiatry
Articles/periodicals
Physics, astronomy, chemistry
Articles/periodicals
Physics, particularly high-energy physics
All publication types
All subjects/disciplines
Books/monographs
Media studies
Books/monographs
Political science
Blog posts
Law
Books/monographs
Adult education etc.
Open-access initiatives
"Open-access initiatives" is a catch-all term for initiatives geared towards improving access to academic publishing and/or bringing about a complete shift or transformation in favor of open access.
All open-access initiatives
The University of Bonn is taking part in the open-access transformation of books published by De Gruyter. Nine new publications per subject in the fields of German literature, German linguistics and history are being made available in an open-access format, with authors not incurring any publication costs.
Term: 2022–2024
More details are available here
The University of Bonn is participating in the open-access crowdfunding organized by the Specialised Information Service (SIS) Education.
Up to 20 books from the field are to be published on an open-access basis in 2023 with the help of this library alliance, with works selected by a body of experts.
Term: 2023
More details are available here
The University of Bonn is taking part in Knowledge Unlatched HSS Books (Frontlist).
This initiative sees libraries contribute financially to making journals and books open access. The aim is to transform quality-assured journals and books from various publishers, with funding provided by libraries through a national and international crowdfunding scheme.
Subjects: anthropology, communications, culture and media research, English language and literature, history, modern languages and linguistics, politics and international studies, sociology
Term: 2023
More details are available here
The University of Bonn is taking part in the Knowledge Unlatched HSS Journals Select initiative. Authors do not incur any costs for publishing in four journals devoted to linguistics, theology, philosophy and anthropology.
More details are available here
The University of Bonn is taking part in a project entitled KOALA ("Konsortiale Open Access Lösungen aufbauen" or "Developing consortium-based open-access solutions").
The project is developing an alternative financing model that sees institutions form consortia and share the costs of open-access publications in their specialist fields.
A total of six media and social sciences works are being co-financed in this way from January 2023 onward.
Term: 2023
More details are available here
The University of Bonn is taking part in the initiative being run by the open-access publisher Language Science Press, which publishes quality-assured open-access monographs on linguistics under a CC BY license. A total of 30 monographs are to be published in an open-access format every year (2021–2023), with authors not incurring any publication costs.
Term: 2021–2023
More details are available here
The Millennium Studies publication series is one of the most important publication media in De Gruyter's Classical Studies program. The University of Bonn is involved in efforts to make the series open access. This is facilitating open access for research work that is outstanding in its field without authors incurring any costs themselves.
Term: 2023
More details are available here
Members of the University of Bonn get free access to Mohr Siebeck's frontlist on IT law.
This initiative is making all Mohr Siebeck's new IT law publications available in an open-access format between 2021 and 2023. There will be 10 such new publications every year on subjects including media law, digitalization law and Internet law.
Term: 2021–2023
The University of Bonn is supporting Open Book Publishers, an open-access publisher. The authors themselves do not incur any publication costs. Members of the University of Bonn can download the e-books in all available digital formats and get a 15 percent discount on purchases of printed editions via the publisher's website.
Open Book Publishers operates on a non-commercial basis and publishes open-access books on the humanities and social sciences.
Term: 2023
More details are available here
The University of Bonn supports the Open Library of Humanities (OLH) organization. Authors are not charged any fees for publishing in one of the platform's periodicals.
The OLH is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing open access without any publication fees. It is funded via an international alliance made up mainly of libraries and universities. The OLH’s publication platform publishes periodicals on the humanities and social sciences and hosts its own multidisciplinary journal. All articles are thoroughly peer-reviewed.
Term: October 1, 2022–October 31, 2023
More details are available here
The University of Bonn supports the non-commercial organization SciPost. Authors can publish their articles in all SciPost periodicals in an open-access format under a Creative Commons license. They do not incur any publication costs themselves.
Term: 2023
More details are available here
The University of Bonn is involved in the SCOAP3 project. Corresponding authors from the University can publish their articles in SCOAP3's periodicals in an open-access format (under a Creative Commons license) at no cost to themselves.
SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics) is an alliance of libraries and researchers from all over the world who publish academic works on particle physics on an open-access basis.
Term: 2024
More details are available here
The University of Bonn is supporting the SPARC Europe open-access initiative. The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is an alliance of libraries that promotes global initiatives for open access, open data and open education, including on a political level.
Term: 2023
More details are available here
This library alliance is arranging the publication of a total of 39 books from the publisher transcript's media studies range in an open-access format from 2022 onward. The authors themselves do not incur any publication costs.
Term: 2023
More details are available here
The University of Bonn is taking part in the transcript Open Library Politikwissenschaft project. Authors whose books it funds pay lower publication fees (€ 2,300 on average).
The transcript Open Library Politikwissenschaft is a project set up by the Specialised Information Service (SIS) for Political Science and the publisher transcript and mediated by the National Contact Point Open Access. The aim is to publish the Politikwissenschaft transcript frontlist in the fields of international and European politics, political parties, globalization, social movement and civil society, policy, politics, political theory and polity in an open-access format.
Term: 2023
More details are available here
The Verfassungsblog ("constitution blog") is a well-known blog on constitutional and legal policy issues. Over 1,000 different authors have published posts on it to date, giving it the reputation of a high-quality, high-reach publication medium in the legal academic community.
The University of Bonn is helping the Verfassungsblog to operate on an open-access basis via the BMBF's Offener Zugang zu Öffentlichem Recht project ("Public Access to Public Law", or OZOR).
Term: 2023
More details are available here
The University of Bonn is supporting the wbv Open Library transformation initiative. Members of the University get free access to selected new publications (e-books) in 2023 in the publisher wbv's subdisciplines of adult, vocational and business education. Authors pay one third of the standard publication fees.
Term: 2023
More details are available here
Framework agreements
Framework agreements are concluded between a publisher and a group of organizations and allow the individual organizations to acquire open-access articles from certain periodicals or publishers without having to take out a separate subscription for each article.
All framework agreements
Up to an open-access publication fee of gross €2,000, corresponding authors from the University of Bonn can publish in Copernicus’ gold open-access periodicals under a CC-BY license without incurring any costs themselves. Higher publication costs are not currently covered by the agreement and must be borne by the authors. You may be able to obtain pro rata funding from our publication fund in these scenarios.
The project has been negotiated and organized by Göttingen State and University Library together with Copernicus, a publisher specializing in geosciences, engineering sciences and life sciences.
Term: 2023
More details are available here
The University of Bonn has added its name to a framework agreement concluded between the TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and University Library in Hanover and the publisher PLOS (Public Library of Science). Corresponding authors from the University of Bonn can publish their articles in all 12 of the publisher’s periodicals at no cost to themselves.
PLOS is a non-profit open-access publisher of open-access periodicals in the natural and life sciences and related fields. Besides discipline-specific journals such as PLOS Biology and PLOS Medicine, PLOS also publishes the international multidisciplinary journal PLOS ONE.
Term: January 1, 2023–December 31, 2024
- Be sure to use your institutional email address with the domain @uni-bonn.de or @ukbonn.de for the submission.
- If you have an ORCID, please include it.
- Select your institution from the drop-down menu.
- At the payment step, please select "My institution will pay all or part of the fee".
We will pay the entire cost. If you receive an invoice after article acceptance, an error occurred in the submission process. In this case, please contact us or directly: openaccess@ulb.uni-bonn.de
The list of journals can be found here (under “University of Bonn”).
More details are available here
Agreements: Publish & Read
Publish & Read agreements (also known as PAR, Read & Publish, etc.) entitle you as a member of the University of Bonn not only to read the content brought out by a publisher but also to have your work published by it on an open-access basis. The offer is funded via the University. These agreements have become better known thanks to the DEAL project.
All Publish & Read agreements
The University of Bonn has signed a Publish & Read agreement with Cambridge University Press (CUP) as part of a consortium funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). This allows authors from the University to publish their articles on an open-access basis in many of the publisher’s periodicals. The publication fees due for this are covered by a license fee paid centrally.
Term: 2022-2024
More details are available here
The University of Bonn has added its signature to an open- access transformation agreement with De Gruyter that allows its authors to publish articles on an open-access basis under the following conditions:
Publication in hybrid humanities, social sciencesand economics periodicals is free for authors. The open-access publication fees (APCs) will be covered by the University of Bonn following approval.
A 20 percent discount on the open-access publication fee (APC) is available for OA-only periodicals. Funding from the University of Bonn's publication fund for articles can be applied for to meet these costs.
In the case of articles with several authors, the person who serves as the contact for the publisher will be considered the eligible author. The publisher’s contact is the person who signs the publication agreement (the "corresponding author"). Besides research papers, the agreement also covers other types of article such as book reviews.
More details are available here
The University of Bonn has added its name to a framework agreement concluded between Göttingen State and University Library and the publisher Hogrefe in respect of the PsyJournals. This provides read access to all PsyJournals and allows corresponding authors from the University of Bonn to publish their articles in PsyJournals at no cost to themselves.
Term: 2023
Information for authors can be found here
More details are available here