For more than ten years Open Access has been established as a new publication model. Scientific documents are made available on the internet without any access restrictions. The author’s intellectual property rights remain unaffected. There are no financial, legal or technical barriers. Documents can be downloaded, printed, copied and forwarded without any limitations. Important obligation for users: the correct citation of authorship.

The principles of Open Access were defined in the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledges in the Sciences and Humanities. Further information can be found on open-access.net.

The USB Cologne supports the idea of Open Access. With KUPS the USB provides a hosting platform for all university members to make their publications freely available on the internet. Publications will be found by search engines. Scientific content is distributed globally. Authors keep their copyrights without any restrictions (for further information see Legal issues).

Publishing Open access has several benefits

• long-term worldwide availability on the internet
• widest possible dissemination of scientific content
• searchable in search engines and bibliographical catalogues
• easy way of scientific exchange with other research groups