The University of Stuttgart sees it as its mission to develop seminal innovations and to ensure the education of future generations. It stands by its commitment to make the knowledge and collective achievements of its scientists available to society.
Therefore, in addition to the electronic publishing option for doctoral or post-doctoral theses, the University of Stuttgart supports other Open Access publishing models both within the framework of the so-called „Gold Open Access“ (in publisher products) and the so-called „Green Open Access“ (preprint and self-archiving on institutional storage systems). It sees this as a way of enabling all people to have free and equal access to the results of scientific work while at the same time ensuring optimal dissemination of scientific results.
Open Access publications in recognized and scientifically verified media achieve a higher degree of general accessibility than comparable publications in access-restricted media. Therefore, Open Access publications also increase the accessibility of the respective scientific work and make scientists and the universities and institutions behind them more visible to the outside world.
With the publication platform OPUS, the University of Stuttgart has an excellent option for Open Access publishing. In the “Ranking Web of World Repositories”, OPUS reached place 19 (out of 1,120 evaluated ones) of the institutional repositories worldwide (as of January 2011). OPUS allows both primary publications and self-archiving. In the course of the growing significance of Open Access publications, the publication portal OPUS is continuously expanded and adapted to the current requirements of scientists. Of particular significance is the embedding in a network of national and international because this promotes free access to scientific information and the exchange of scientific results even more.
Therefore, the University of Stuttgart explicitly encourages and supports its scientists to present their research results to the worldwide scientific community as well as to the general public via Open Access in the sense of the “Berlin Declaration“1 on open access to knowledge in the sciences and humanities. In doing so, they should insist on retaining the exploitation rights for the electronic versions.
The University of Stuttgart Library offers advice and support in this regard.
Stuttgart, February 28, 2011
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Wolfram Ressel
Rector of the University of Stuttgart
1 https://openaccess.mpg.de/Berlin-Declaration
Download of the policy as PDF file (DE)