Open Access Award

The Open Access Award of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin honours outstanding or exceptional achievements by members of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in the area of open access, the free access to research results. The award is intended to encourage more open access at the university and to make it more visible. The prize enables the funding of further plans and projects on open access.

The award was established in 2020 and awarded for the first time the following year.

Announcement and awarding

The call for applications for the award is made annually, usually during the second half of the year. The award is awarded annually by the Open Access Officer of Humboldt-Universität.

In general, one prize will be awarded. However, the awarding committee reserves the right to split the prize and the prize money into two individual prizes if there are two applications with likewise outstanding and equally prize-worthy achievements that are either completely different in nature or should be distinguished due to the clearly different scientific status of the potential prize-winners in the interest of fairness.

Prize money

The total prize money is € 5,000. It enables the award winner(s) to finance future open access publications or to realise projects that promote the free availability of scientific results or strengthen the open access principle in teaching and research. The funds are administered by the university library and can only be used for non-personnel costs.

Award criteria

The award may be granted to individuals as well as to groups of members of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Individuals are only eligible if they are members of Humboldt-Universität. In the case of groups, at least half of the group must be members of Humboldt-Universität.

The requirement criteria for the award are:

  • a special commitment or engagement for open access publishing or in making publications freely accessible (includes both genuine and initial open access text publications, so-called gold open access, and free access to already published but initially not freely accessible text publications, so-called green open access; includes journal articles as well as monographs and edited volumes, and other types of text publications);
  • or, the successful carrying-out of a project or the creation of a product with the aim of implementing and strengthening open access (e. g. founding a genuine open access journal, transformation of a closed-access journal into an open access journal, creating a web resource or a service, developing software or helpful tools);
  • or, a special commitment to communicating and transferring open access and its principles to the public, the scientific community or the wider community of a field/discipline.

Application

Applications are currently not possible. Information on the next application phase will be announced here.

Laureates

2021 (awarded 2022)

read the news of the announcement of the award and the award ceremony (German)

2020 (awarded 2021)

  • Category Individual (2,500 €): Dr. Constanze Baum (Department of German Literature)
  • Category Group/Project (2,500 €): The Urban Transcripts Journal and its editors (Department of Social Sciences)
  • Special price in the category Junior Scientists (1,000 €): Journal Die junge Mommsen and its editors (Department of History)

read the news of the announcement of the award (German)

read the news of the award ceremony (German)

Contact

Please contact us if you have any questions:

Open Access Team of the University Library
E-mail: openaccess@ub.hu-berlin.de (preferred)
Contact person: Marc Lange (phone: +49 30 2093-99292)