Green Open Access Self-Archiving

The library supports self-archiving and accessibility of full texts on the “green road” to Open Access in the institutional repository of the Max Planck Society.

Scientists can use MPG.PuRe to self-archive a second publication of their accepted and published manuscript.

The library staff help make the work of scientists widely accessible to a broad public outside the bounds of publishing.

The resulting publication collections can be used as a personal publishing portfolio and can be displayed on your own website, the department webpages, the MPG Yearbook and the Fachbeirat report.

Rights to secondary publication

Works published since January 1, 2014 in a periodical that appears at least biannually and whose underlying research is funded at least 50% by non-university institutions or public third-party funds, may be published a second time in the accepted manuscript version in MPG.PuRe within twelve months of initial publication.

Authors of scientific publications can make use of this right to secondary publication from January 1, 2015, regardless of current German publishing contracts.

Reading author’s agreements critically

When publishing in an open access journal, authors retain their rights of use, including the right to second publication of the work. Normally, the publisher is granted a simple right of use. By contrast, in subscription-based journals, publishing contracts include the request to waive many or even all rights of use.

Signing such restrictive contracts uncritically is a major obstacle on the way to more open and accessible scientific communication. Authors lose an important part of their rights and the freedom of choice on the re-use of their works.

One way to retain the right to republish is to make sure a clause such as the SPARC Author's Addendum is added to the contract.

Only if all agreements specified in the contract are known can further usage of the publication be decided on. Authors must keep this information in order to protect their rights with regard to their publication.

When signing or consenting to publishing agreements online, scientists are encouraged by agreement of the board of directors to send a copy of the publishing contract to the FHI library.