Letting knowledge flow freely

ETH Zurich’s new Open Access policy supports swissuniversities’ (the Rectors’ Conference of Swiss Higher Education Institutions) external pagenational Open Access strategycall_made and incorporates central statements from the external pagesurvey on Open Accesscall_made conducted by ETH researchers in spring 2017. The Executive Board implemented the revised policy on 1 February 2018.

Its core statements are:

• ETH Zurich is committed to ensuring that access to its researchers’ knowledge is as unobstructed as possible.
• ETH researchers should be able to publish freely and in compliance with the publication culture of their field. This applies above all to young researchers, who ETH Zurich particularly wants to support in developing their careers.
• ETH Zurich encourages its researchers to also store their research findings in ETH’s own Research Collection with free access, as long as this does not conflict with any legal constraints.
• ETH also encourages its researchers to publish directly in open access journals, and will provide resources to offset the associated costs. ETH supports researchers’ critical participation in quality assurance bodies and on the editorial boards of open access journals.
• If research funding institutions have open access requirements for publication, the ETH Library will provide advice for their implementation.

A further important aspect of ETH’s new Open Access policy is that it will increase the public transparency of published research. Freely available knowledge enables greater replication of results. ETH’s Open Access policy therefore contributes to research integrity, something which is an absolute priority for the university. Our OA policy and the related individual advice offered by the ETH Library also help researchers to avoid untrustworthy publication platforms that have appeared as part of the increase in OA.