About GenderOpen
GenderOpen is a service platform for German-language gender studies. It was set up with the support of the German Research Foundation (DFG) by the gender studies centers of the three Berlin universities: the Margherita von Brentano Center (Free University), the Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies ZtG (Humboldt University), and the Center for Interdisciplinary Women’s and Gender Studies (Technical University). GenderOpen gives gender studies researchers the opportunity to publish their work in Open Access easily and free of charge.
As well as original publications, texts that have already appeared elsewhere can be republished and electronically archived. They are given permanent addresses (“persistent identifiers”) so that they can be referenced over long periods of time. To ensure the international visibility of the publications, promoting their reception and citation frequency, the texts published on GenderOpen can be found using search engines such as Google, Google Scholar, and BASE, and in databases such as OpenAire.
In line with the Open Access policy of the German Research Foundation, the Open Access policies of the Free University Berlin and the Technical University Berlin, and the Open Access Declaration of the Humboldt University Berlin, GenderOpen is actively committed to comprehensively implementing the goals of Open Access as set out in the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities:
- permanent, free-of-charge access to scholarly and scientific information
- the opportunity to freely reuse such information
- unrestricted distribution
- permitted reproduction and adaptation of the work.
These comprehensive opportunities for use are ensured while still maintaining authors’ rights by means of free licenses, for example Creative Commons Licenses. So that these goals can be realized as fully as possible, GenderOpen strongly recommends assigning the Creative Commons License CC-BY, version 4.0.
Collection profile
The GenderOpen publication service is open to all members of universities and non-university research institutions, along with independent researchers holding a university degree. Apart from a thematic relevance to gender studies, there are just two conditions for research to be published on GenderOpen:
- The author must have the right to reproduce and distribute the contribution and to make it publicly available.
- The contribution must be presented as a PDF document without password protection or security restrictions, or preferably as a PDF/A document. Tips on creating a PDF/A document and further information can be found here.
The types of texts that GenderOpen accepts and publishes are:
- articles in journals,
- papers in edited volumes or proceedings,
- doctoral and professorial dissertations,
- monographs
- working papers.
These text types have already been subjected to quality assurance, and GenderOpen does not carry out an additional evaluation of the content of submissions. However, the GenderOpen team does its best to identify texts with discriminatory or offensive content and to ensure that these are not released.
Ideally, the version deposited in GenderOpen should be the original published one, but we also accept authors’ preprint or postprint versions. We recommend that you use a version with pagination corresponding to the published version. If the manuscript version is identical to the final publication in content whereas the preprint is not, we prefer the manuscript version.
Book or article reviews are not accepted for GenderOpen.
Legal framework
Before a piece of research can be published on GenderOpen, the non-exclusive right to reproduce the text and make it publicly available must be granted to the repository by the author. The author’s copyright and rights of use remain in place; thus, after publication on GenderOpen, authors are still free to publish their texts elsewhere in print or electronic form.
Granting the non-exclusive right of use to the operators of GenderOpen encompasses:
- the right to make electronic copies of the digital object publicly available (after any embargo period has expired), and if necessary to modify its format for compatibility with future computer systems. This permission does not include any modification to the content of the digital object. The right applies to all known present, and possible future, types of use.
- The right to announce and distribute the digital objects to third parties, for example as part of national collections, especially for the purposes of long-term archiving.
- The right to grant the agreed rights and obligations to another repository. The repository’s operators are also entitled to commission a third party (for example a facility specializing in long-term accessibility) to place the digital object in the public domain.
- The right to publish the metadata and abstract under a CC0 license.
To enable transfer of the necessary rights of use from the author to the repository operators, a deposit license is offered whenever an electronic text is registered on GenderOpen.
In addition, authors can use a Creative Commons license to grant the public certain rights of use that go beyond the German Copyright Law. For the publication of research in the repository, GenderOpen recommends assigning the Creative Commons license CC BY 4.0.
It is the duty of authors to identify any rights of third parties that may be affected. If an author discovers that there is, or will be, some kind of legal obstacle, they must inform the operators of GenderOpen immediately. The operators reserve the right to block access to an electronic text if there is concrete reason to believe that the rights of third parties may have been infringed. The operators do not accept liability for any damage resulting from the infringement of copyright and rights of use.
Further details on rights and licenses can be found in the Information for Authors in the GenderOpen blog.
Technical basis and long-term accessibility
GenderOpen is operated using the repository software package DSpace. The software is hosted by the Computer and Media Service of the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, which also guarantees that content published in the repository will be archived for at least five years. Published documents may not be modified or deleted. To ensure a stable URL, each document is given an individual permanent address in the form of a DOI (Digital Object Identifier).
Here you will find all information again for download as a pdf.