Open Access am Standort D – erweiterte Perspektiven für die Wissenschaft / Open Access in Germany – new prospects for science and scholarship

The increasing implementation of the Open Access idea has given rise to new scholarly information-supply and communication models in both the German and international research landscapes. For example, over half the research-oriented universities in Germany now operate their own institutional repository. In the long term, Open Access repositories represent an ideal basic infrastructure for handling scholarly publications since they offer worldwide accessibility, enhanced visibility and value-added services such as disciplinary and cross-disciplinary search options, usage statistics and citation analysis. This contribution provides an up-to-date overview and describes not only the current framework conditions and developments but also the barriers to development in the German repository landscape. It also deals with initiatives designed to introduce publishers, authors and general information providers to Open Access practices.