Book Processing Charges (BPC) are the fees charged by a publisher for the publication of a monograph which, in addition to the printed book, is available electronically in Open Access immediately after publication.

Creative Commons (CC) licences are used to define the rights of use of open access publications. Further information and an overview of the possible licences can be found here.

In the DEALS project, contracts are being negotiated with the major academic publishers (Wiley, Springer, Elsevier) throughout Germany. The key points of these contracts include access to the complete journal portfolio of the respective publisher and switching publications by German authors to open access. Financing is based on the publication volume of the participating institutions. You can find out more about the contracts already concluded here.

Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) are attributed to electronic publications, similar to an ISBN, and can additionally be used as link resolvers to grant permanent citability. Information on our DOI services can be found here.

The RUB hosts various open access publications by RUB researchers on the open source platforms OJS (Open Journal Systems) und OMP (Open Monograph Press) If you are interested in publishing on OJS or OMP, you can find out more here.

Plan S is an initiative spearheaded by the cOAlition S to encourage that all publicly funded publications are or will be made Open Access. According to the plan, by 2021 (or within one year of committing to Plan S), all such publications should either be available in public repositories or published in Open Access journals.

A postprint is the final version of a manuscript of an article approved for publication (after the review process, before formal adaptation to the journal's design).

Predatory publishers are publishers who only pretend to publish high-quality open access journals. They often claim that submitted manuscripts go through a peer review process that does not actually take place. You can find more on the topic of Predatory Publishing here.

A preprint is the version of an article that has been submitted to the publisher for the review process.

A (university) repository is a database in which documents such as dissertations, research reports or preprints are hosted and thus made publicly available on a long-term basis. Here you can find the repository of the Ruhr University Bochum, which is managed by the University Library.

Many publishers allow the secondary publication (also: self-archiving) of an already published article on the university's document repository. This so-called "green road" allows you to make your academic texts freely accessible permanently, free of charge and with little effort. You can find more information here.