Open Access Infrastructures at FU Berlin
Freie Universität Berlin provides various open access infrastructures that facilitate the publication and dissemination of research results. These include the Berlin University Alliance’s university press (Berlin Universities Publishing), the institutional repository (Refubium), and hosting services for journals, books, and encyclopedias. All services are designed to ensure quality assurance, global visibility, and sustainability, and are available free of charge to FU members.
Berlin Universities Publishing (BerlinUP) is an open-access publisher operating within a non-commercial, academic infrastructure and offering general, publisher-independent publication consulting. BerlinUP was funded by the Berlin University Alliance (BUA) and is jointly supported by the libraries of Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt University of Berlin, Technical University of Berlin, and Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin.
Services
- Publication of monographs, anthologies, and series
- Publication of journals
- Online store offering free full-text book titles and the option to order print versions
- Consulting on all questions regarding open-access publishing, including those unrelated to BerlinUP’s publication offerings
Benefits at a Glance
- Quality assurance
- Diamond Open Access (scholar-led; free of charge for authors)
- Visibility through standards such as Creative Commons licenses, DOI, ISBN, ISSN, ORCiD
- Personalized support from the BerlinUP team
Contact
Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching materials such as presentations, graphics, worksheets, courses, or textbooks that are licensed under open licenses and may be reused free of charge. The University Library’s service is aimed at faculty members who wish to publicly document, share, and make their materials visible, as well as make them available for reuse by others, and/or who wish to reuse open educational resources created by others.
Services
- OER information and service platform for faculty at Freie Universität Berlin
- Support in searching for and using open educational resources
- Support in creating OER for teaching
- Workshops on OER
Benefits at a Glance
- Sustainability and visibility of your teaching materials beyond the FU
- Promotion of reuse and openness in teaching
- Time and effort savings through your own reuse of others’ open educational resources
Contact
The Open Encyclopedia System (OES), developed at Freie Universität, is a standardized, web-based research software platform for the creation, publication, and maintenance of scholarly, entry-based online publications (encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks, etc.) in the humanities and social sciences under an open-access model. As such, OES adds another open-access solution to the range of electronic publishing options already available for online journals and online monographs.
Services
- Consulting & Requirements Analysis: Development of tailored strategies for OES projects
- Setup & System Integration: OES instance, configuration, plugins & themes
- Ongoing Support & Maintenance: Updates, further development, troubleshooting
- Support for collaborative publication processes: cross-site management & quality assurance
- Training: efficient use of the content management system and best practices
Benefits at a Glance
- Hosting & operation, including data protection and high availability
- Customization of data model and presentation layer through comprehensive configuration options
- Modularly expandable via OES plugins and themes
- DOI/URN assignment, metadata management, long-term visibility
- Workshops & training for researchers and editors
Further Information
Members of Freie Universität can publish their work free of charge on the institutional repository Refubium. Publications are freely accessible worldwide and can be searched in various catalogs, search engines, and citation databases. Long-term archiving for at least ten years is guaranteed, and the assignment of persistent identifiers (DOIs) ensures that these publications can be uniquely referenced.
Services
- Publication of documents, bachelor’s and master’s theses, dissertations, habilitation theses, and research data
- Consultation on all questions related to the publication process, including clarification of legal issues
- Support for secondary publications, including rights verification
Benefits at a Glance
- Free of charge for FU members
- Visible, discoverable, and citable worldwide
- Legally compliant publishing, including standardized metadata and long-term availability
- Individual consultation by the University Publications Office/Document Server team
Further Information
- Refubium website
- You can contact the Document Server editorial team at edocs@ub.fu-berlin.de.