Open Access books

Golden path

The ebook edition is available free of charge in sync with the print edition under a CC license selected by the author.

Green path

»Green« Open Access refers to various publication practices. For oekom books, the »green road« means that the ebook edition is initially published under a retail price and is made available free of charge later (after a fixed time period). Common embargo periods are 12 or 24 months. After the embargo period has expired, the book can be turned into an Open Access publication on January 1st of the next year (a peculiarity of the book market: the reason for this is that the e-book must be removed from various commercial ebook packages and provided with a new license, which is only possible at the turn of the year).

Legal note: If a publication in green open access is planned, the license should already be clarified at the time of publication. If, for example, the publication contains external material on a larger scale, the use of this material in a freely accessible online version must be concerted at the time of signing with the publisher.

Due to the different media forms, the Open Access models of our journals and books differ. On the detailed pages of our journals GAIA, TATuP, Ökologisches Wirtschaften, Raumforschung und Raumordnung and Briefe zur Interdisziplinarität you will find information on the respective Open Access model under »Open Access und Copyright / Open Access and Copyright«.

All open access publications published by oekom are published under a Creative Commons license. Our book authors are free to choose any of the available licenses. To protect your copyright in the best possible way, we recommend the CC BY-NC-ND license for books.

This license allows for the digital version of the book to be reproduced and distributed if there is no commercial use, the author and rights are appropriately stated, and the material has not been modified or edited.

With the choice of the license, the authors themselves decide which further uses are released.

More information about the Creative Commons licenses can be found here.

The publication of professional and scientific publications involves costs and investments and represents an economic risk for the publisher. Traditionally, the publisher's investment in a book is covered by book sales and often supported by a grant from the author.

In the case of an OA publication, the loss of sales revenue from the ebook, a possible decline in print sales, and the need to provide additional OA services result in a deficit that must be offset by an OA fee. This fee (Book Processing Charge) is calculated individually, depending on scope, target group, expected impact on revenues, and reviewed regularly. The additional costs for an average OA book publication with oekom currently lie between 800 and 1600 €. Each book project, whether financially supported or not, is calculated individually by us. Our project managers will be happy to prepare an individual OA offer for you.

• For our Open Access publications, we provide the same quality services in terms of content and form as for our other publications.
• In consultation with the author, we issue Creative Commons licenses and a DOI.
• Every oekom Open Access publication is published as a printed book and in PDF format.
• The ebook is »bookmarked« and searchable, allowing convenient navigation within the file.
• Creation of dense metadata guarantees that the publication can be easily found.
• OA publications are distributed through the same distribution channels as our paid ebooks.
• Publications are included in our promotional and sales brochures, highlighted as OA publications on the publisher's website, announced to journalists, and made available as review copies.
• Cooperations with relevant repositories and discovery services are continuously expanded.

If a publication or chapter has been published as Open Access, authors are free to redistribute the publisher's version of the PDF. The prerequisite for this is that the content is marked with the Creative Commons license under which the original work was published, and that the original source is cited with a link to the publisher's website.

If you are the author of an article in an edited volume or anthology: Even if your article is not published as Open Access, you can upload the texts you publish with us in institutional repositories or via networks such as ResearchGate for twelve months after publication of the print version. Please cite the source for any further provision [Example: Last name, first name: chapter/contribution, in: first name last name (ed.), title of anthology, page reference. © oekom verlag (year of publication)] and refer to the publication's product page on the publisher's website.

Because of German book pricing law, if you are the author of an entire book that is not published as Open Access, you can only upload individual chapters for the purpose of self-archiving in institutional repositories or via networks such as ResearchGate for twelve months after publication of the print version. If you do so, please cite the source for any further provision [Example: Last name, first name: chapter/contribution, in: first name last name (ed.), title of anthology, page reference. © oekom verlag (year of publication)] and refer to the publication's product page on the publisher's website.

If you are interested in making your book available as Open Access, our project managers are happy to prepare an offer for open access.

An overview of all our open access books can be found in the list of open access books. In addition, oekom verlag publishes four journals with different OA models: TATuP, GAIA, Ökologisches Wirtschaften, Spatial Research and Planning, and Briefe zur Interdisziplinarität.