Academic libraries offer their users access to numerous online publications for which a fee is charged. Nevertheless, you will often find that online access fails due to publishers' "paywalls", as licensing all publishers' publications is not financially viable for any institution.

In addition, UDE has cancelled the subscription to its Elsevier journals in the context of the DEAL negotiations.

However, there are often alternatives to a publisher's publication behind a paywall: secondary publication of an article in open access on scientific repositories.

We have compiled some information for you here on how to make your articles available worldwide as a second publication in open access or how to find second publications.

For example, you may publish the "Author's Accepted Manuscript" (AAM), i.e. the peer-reviewed and corrected version of an article, on the basis of the publisher's terms and conditions or §38 UrhG (German Copyright Act), usually after an embargo period has expired.

You can find the publishing conditions in your author contract. The free platform SHERPA/RoMEO provides a first insight into the terms and conditions of secondary publication and embargo periods of numerous publishers, but this information is not legally binding.

Hint: If you enter your publication in the university bibliography, information on second publication conditions will be displayed there directly.

The info page of "Open Access Button" helps you to distinguish between the different manuscript versions.

You will also find "Direct2AAM", a tool for finding your author manuscripts on the publishing platforms, if you have not saved the AAMs locally.

For articles you have published in paid journals or collective works, DuEPublico, the repository of the UDE, offers members of our university a platform for publishing AAMs.

You are welcome to upload your AAMs on DuEPublico before the embargo period ends, publication will only take place after the embargo expires.

The DuEPublico team thus relieves you of the burden of meeting the respective deadlines and offers you the fastest possible open access publication of your research results.

If you are looking for alternative versions of an article hidden behind a paywall, there are proven free tools:

If you list "all versions" of an article in the results of your Google Scholar search, you may also find manuscript versions that are freely available.

Install the add-on "Unpaywall"(currently available for Firefox and Google Chrome) and display accessible article versions with one click.

Users of iOS and Safari (macOS) as well as Google Chrome can find OA versions of articles using the "Open Access Helper" app.

The OA search by DOI in the "Simple Query Tool" is another offer from Unpaywall. Here you can search for up to 1000 DOIs simultaneously.

You can also conveniently search for secondary publications of articles on the "Open Access Button" page. In addition, the "Open Access Button" is available as a browser extension for Firefox and Google Chrome.

Further information on the topic of secondary publication can be found on the website of Duisburg-Essen University Library:
"Secondary publication on DuEPublico"

If you have any questions, the DuEPublico team will be happy to help you.