Since the introduction of its first Open Access Guideline in 2011, the IAB has been following the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities and, being a publicly funded institution, pursues the goal of promoting free dissemination of quality-checked results of the labour market and employment research in the sense of open access.
Open access policy
The current Guideline of the IAB regarding open access (PDF, not freely accessible) became effective in 2018 and aims to promote free access to the publications from the IAB. The Management of the IAB recommends that all employees should take the open access issues into consideration for publication planning. The freedom of publication and the regulations of quality assurance and good scientific practices remain unaffected.
The IAB supports its staff in publication planning, financing through author fees and submission of documents that can be made freely accessible from the aspect of open access (secondary publication). It controls the process of sharing the IAB media and their meta data with the relevant disciplinary repositories in the field of economics and social sciences, and offers legal advice to the IAB authors.
In addition to this, the Research Data Centre of the IAB (FDZ) provides access to the standardised IAB research data also to external scientists while considering data protection by means of transparent access regulations.
IAB publications
All publications in the IAB series are directly available for free download and have been published under the Creative Commons Licence CC BY 4.0 since 2022. Therefore, they can be freely downloaded and subsequently used.
The refereed Journal for Labour Market Research was switched to open access in 2016 and is also issued under the Creative Commons Licence CC BY 4.0. The authors submitting their contributions will have them published free of charge (Diamond Open Access).
In order to improve the visibility of the IAB’s freely accessible publications, cooperation was established with Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (ZBW) and Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences (GESIS), which will secure the access to the IAB series in specialist repositories SSOAR and EconStor.
Open access transformation
To finance publication in external scientific journals, the IAB has set up a publication fund which provides budget resources for covering author fees and allows the IAB employees to make free open access publications.
The IAB also takes part in the project “DEAL – Nationwide Licensing of Portfolios of Major Academic Publishing Houses”, which aims to promote the transition of scientific publication systems to open access by means of transformative agreements.
To increase cost transparency and in the sense of open data, the IAB transmits the costs for covering author fees to the OpenAPC initiative on an annual basis.