Open Access

Open Access Policy of PANGAEA (modified from the OA policy of Georg-August-University, Göttingen) The Internet has become an essential piece of the global scientific enterprise as a medium for communication, information and publication. At the same time, the amount of data related to earth system research increases exponentialy. In most cases, it is not possible to print related primary data in tabels due to limited space, page charges of just the amount of data. Most of the publishers now provide repositories for supplementary material, but especially data archiving in this way encounters various problems:
 * 1) Access to supplements is only possible, if the user has access to the full text of a journal, which means the data are NOT in OA.
 * 2) The publishers do not have any rules for the description of the data (metadata); the reviewers mostly do not care.
 * 3) The technical file format is rarely machine-readable ASCII; can be anything like xls, doc, proprietary binary code, pdf or even worth password-protected pdf.
 * 4) The scientific format is individual; abbreviations might not be explained, neither in the table, nor in the text; units are missing; format does not follow international standards.
 * 5) Space is limited

To meet this challenge on a global scale activities are underway to provide Open Access to a larger share of scientific data. The OECD and in consequence funding organizations and research institutions strongly encourage the scientists to deposit their scientific primary (factual) data in repositories. As stated in a declaration of ASTM all their member publishers strongly support that authors archive data related to published articles in OA repositories.

Archiving of data helps authors as well as publishers: articles with an additional online version of the data are cited more often, which enhances visibility and impact of your scientific works’ results. Additionally, higher citation rates improve a journal’s impact factor – a fact highly appreciated by commercial publishers as well. At the same time, the scientific output receives more recognition by being displayed on an international network of data centers and libraries.

All scientific publishers accept this way of displaying data related to their journals on public servers accessible at no cost to participants. Data centers and libraries have begun depositing data on local institutional repositories in standard formats and distributing the citations through library catalogs. Global databases such as OAIster index documents that have been archived in OAI-interface-equipped (Open Archives Initiative) repositories similar to the PANGAEA server. Platforms like Google Scholar, ScientificCommons or commercial services like Web of Science or SCOPUS now index data supplements that have been deposited on trusted repositories such as PANGAEA.

In 2002, the large research-funding organisations signed the ‘Berlin Declaration’, manifesting their support of the Open Access principle. They have also indicated that publication fees can be requested in proposals for research funding. If you have plans to initiate any new publishing activities you are welcome to use the PANGAEA infrastructure, operated and maintained by the Alfred-Wegener-Institute and the University of Bremen.

Links to mentioned institutions

 * ArXiv
 * Berlin Declaration on Open Access
 * BioMed Central
 * DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)
 * Electronic Journal Library
 * Google Scholar
 * Institute for Scientific Indexing
 * OAI (Open Archives Initiative)
 * OAIster (OAI-Harvester)
 * Open Access Server of Göttingen University
 * Public Library of Science
 * SCOPUS
 * SHERPA/RoMEO database
 * University Press Göttingen
 * Web of Science
 * Deutsche OA Site
 * OA Resolution der UNESCO mit Handbuch