A publication is called open access if it is accessible on the internet without any charges to the reader. The members of the University of Basel are obliged by the university's open access policy to make their academic publications accessible in this way (as far as the legal framework allows). There are also additional requirements for publications that are supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation - for example, the SNSF does not accept embargo clauses, i.e. contracts under which a publication only becomes freely available after a certain time has passed.

There are several ways for authors to fulfill these obligations:

Direct Open Access publication

• Gold route: You publish your results in open access journals and open access books, where they are freely accessible. As an author, you pay a publication fee. For funding options, see this subpage.
• Diamond route: The same as the gold route from the perspective of the reader. However, there are no publication fees for you as an author. Such journals and publishers are typically funded directly by academic societies (so-called "scholar-led"). At the University of Basel, there are platforms for Diamond OA journals (eterna) and books (emono).
• Hybrid route: Your article is published in a closed-access journal, but you can pay a publication fee to make your individual article freely accessible. The university has so-called read-and-publish agreements with many of the larger publishers, which means that some of these publication fees may be partially or fully covered by publication discounts.

Open Access through self-archiving

• The green route allows you to publish your results in a fee-based publication, but at the same time deposit your article, book chapter or book in a public archive (repository). This requires that your contract with the publisher allows such a secondary publication (for legal questions about author contracts, see here). The repository of the University of Basel is called edoc and is filled directly from the university's research information system, Universe.