Open Access at the GIGA

The concept of “Open Access” has empowered the GIGA to virtually eliminate the financial, technical, and legal barriers normally faced by many of those seeking to access the Institute’s research findings. This publication strategy ensures that people all around the world have the opportunity to keep up with the latest advances in scholarship.

It can often be difficult to gain access to information and knowledge, particularly for people in certain parts of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East – the GIGA’s specific world regions of focus. As a publicly financed social science research institute and member of the Leibniz Association, the GIGA feels especially obliged to adhere to the Leibniz motto of “theoria cum praxi.” For us, scholarship is for the benefit and good of humanity. Therefore, the Institute strives to make its research findings available as quickly as possible, in keeping with the Open Access principle.

As the main component of a German Research Foundation-funded pilot project, the GIGA began publishing its journals in Open Access format already in 2009, making all content freely available (GIGA Journal Family) – though readers can still subscribe to the print versions. The GIGA Focus series is also made available via Open Access.

Open Access publications have been shown to enjoy a high degree of visibility and significant reach. The GIGA’s Africa Spectrum, for example, is one of the leading Area Studies journals in the world and ranked in the Social Science Citation Index. When research findings are freely accessible, both users and scholars benefit.

The GIGA encourages its scholars to publish articles in accordance with the basic premise of Open Access. This applies to both initial publication in Open Access journals and subsequent publication on so-called document servers, where articles that have already appeared in traditional subscription-based journals are made freely accessible online.

The GIGA has drafted its own guidelines to anchor the principles of Open Access in the overarching goals of the Institute’s work. To provide organisational and legal assistance to our scholars, the GIGA Library established the Open Access Helpdesk. The GIGA set up an Open Access fund to provide financial support for this form of publishing, too. In addition, the GIGA Library has introduced a Research Data Service to support our scholars in all issues of research-data handling during the entire research cycle. Data that was collected by the Institute’s researchers is to be found in the GIGA Metadata Database.

In addition, the GIGA is an active participant in both the Open Access Working Group of the Leibniz Association and the Open Access Days organised by the web platform open-access.net. The GIGA Journal Family’s transition from a wholly subscription-based model to an inclusive, Open Access design is considered a paragon within scholarly publication circles. Since 2019 the GIGA’s four journals have been published by Sage, maintaining the “platinum standard” of the Open Access model.