Publish Open Access
What is Open Access?
"Open access (OA) literature is: digital, online, free of charge and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions"
Suber 2012, 4
Open Access (OA) means free access to scientific information over the internet.
Researchers who publish articles or books in OA or upload their publications to a specialized repository make research accessible worldwide, granting access to the most up-to-date scientific information also to people working outside research institutions or living in underdeveloped countries, where access to traditional pay-per-view content by big publishers is simply too expensive. OA is supported on a global scale by many scientific organizations, libraries, universities and research institutions (see for example the list of signatories of the Berlin Declaration on OA to which USI has adhered in 2016 as 552nd istitution).
Why Open Access?
For several decades, the scientific community has been facing more and more disproportionate cost increases from many scholarly journals. The reasons for this so-called “serial crisis” are complex, but an essential factor is the quasi-monopoly of several publishers. Researchers, working in the environment of financially secure institutes, often do not face the problem directly. However the visibility, re-use and impact of their scientific research suffer from the limitation of access by price-barriers. Through this lens, it is clear that open access to research results should be enforced.
The results of research financed by public funds should be published electronically so that they are freely and immediately available without charge and can thus be reused by third parties, since they are considered as a public good. Several studies have shown that OA helps boost the visibility of research among researchers, the media and the general public. It thus promotes the transfer of knowledge, the rationalisation of resources and the efficiency of research, while accelerating scientific progress. Increasingly, OA is regarded as a new standard of excellence for scientific research, offering new opportunities for funding, partnerships and jobs, most appropriately so in countries with a particularly knowledge-based economy like Switzerland.
In Switzerland, several institutions connected to scientific research and its publication have developed OA policies:
The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) requires that, in principle, all publications relative to research it funded should be published in OA.
The Swiss Academy of humanities and social sciences (SAGW) requires from all publishers receiving its financial support that they develop an OA policy before 2020.
Since 2017, swissuniversities has adopted the Swiss National Open Access Strategy, revised in 2024, aiming at making all publicly funded scholarly publications freely available.
To achieve this vision, the strategy focuses on developing and coordinating infrastructure and services, establishing a supportive legal framework, negotiating with publishers and fostering an open access culture within research communities.
USI aligns with the national strategies with the same principles and objectives, requiring its research community to comply with the national OA requirements.
How to publish Open Access?
Researchers who choose to publish OA may follow several paths. Two of them are the most commonly followed, and the least cumbersome:
Green Road
self-archiving a version of one's publication in the Istitutional Repository of the university or in disciplinary or trans-disciplinary repositories. RERO DOC is the Istitutional Repository for researchers at USI. Please contact the library for any information regarding the upload of publications to RERO DOC.
Gold road
articles or books are directly published online, usually in an Open Access journal or an Open Access ebook platform. For example:
the DOAJ - Directory of Open Access Journals platform lists and informs about OA journals of high quality and trustworthiness.
The project OAPEN displays ebooks in OA published by many academic publishers, in Switzerland as well as worldwide.
Where to publish in Gold OA (art, architecture and related fields)
Lists should be considered non-exhaustive
Individual journals:
Techne. Journal of Technology for Architecture and Environment
ArcHistoR architettura storia restauro - architecture history restoration
Publication portals:
DOAJ lists (Subject: Fine arts):
