Open Access means free and unrestricted online access to scientific and scholarly publications on the internet. The University Library's Open Access LMU provides a hosting platform for academic publications.
Teaching and research staff of all LMU faculties are invited to make their publications available internationally according to the principles of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities by filing them on this server.
Open Publishing LMU offers the option to publish a printed book in parallel to your electronic publication.
The University Library
Respecting usage rights, you can upload to the server publications such as:
If you wish to upload a diploma, master's, bachelor's, or Magister thesis, please follow these instructions.
Please upload your dissertation to the server for electronic theses by following the instructions on Electronic Thesis of LMU Munich.
Some disciplines also host moderated series, in which one or more editors decide whether to include a particular publication. If you are interested in publishing your work in one of the moderated series, please get in touch with one of the editors:
To upload your publications to Open Access LMU, you must first register on Open Access LMU. You will then receive an email containing a link to confirm your user account. You can then login into Open Access LMU immediately.
You can upload your own publications to the server. For this, you will require a user name and a password. You can select both during the once-only registration process. You will then receive an email containing a link, which you must click to confirm your user account.
At any time during the publication procedure, you can save your progress by pressing Save and continue later without losing any data. The library or a contact person from the appropriate faculty will check the indexing details before final publication.
ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is a non-profit organisation that assigns and manages unique identification numbers (ORCID iDs) for authors. The service is supported internationally by numerous research institutions, funding institutions, scientific publishers, and libraries. The University Library of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich is also a member of ORCID.
ORCID and Open Access LMU are linked so that you can export your publications from Open Access LMU to ORCID, or vice versa, your publications from ORCID to Open Access LMU.
Further information about ORCID is available here: https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/orcid.html
Once published, documents can only be deleted from the server in exceptional circumstances (for example, in the case of legal difficulties). If there is a change in content, the document will be saved as a new version.
Authors are responsible for ensuring that third-party legal rights regarding copyright and usage are observed. If other authors are involved in your publication besides yourself, you will need their consent. You confirm this by agreeing to the terms of the usage rights declaration at the end of the publication process.
In order to publish on Open Access LMU, you are required to grant the University Library a permanent, non-exclusive usage license allowing the University Library to store your publication on its servers and to make it available publicly without restriction. You further grant the University Library permission to forward your publication to other libraries and portals, in particular to the German National Library in Frankfurt/Main.
Granting non-exclusive usage rights means that you can still post your publication elsewhere or print it without asking the University Library for permission. You can also grant a third party the right to post your publication elsewhere or print it. However, you can no longer grant a third party exclusive usage rights.
If you plan to release your work through a publisher, you should make sure you award the publisher non-exclusive rights only (not exclusive usage rights) if at all possible. You will then be able to publish additional copies of your work on repositories such as Open Access LMU. You will find a suggestion on how to extend the contract with your publisher on the server of the European Commission.
Many journals allow works to be published in parallel on an institutional Open-Access-Server, either simultaneously or after a certain period has elapsed, usually a couple of months. The SHERPA-RoMEO-list gives you information to individual publishers and journals.
As copyright holder, you decide to what extent and on what terms others may re-use your publication, e.g., by granting a Creative Commons License. Creative Commons are standardised license agreements.
The following Creative Commons Licenses (version 4.0) are available at Open Access LMU:
According to the principles of Open Access, we recommend CC BY.
Step 2 under the section Publishing on Open Access LMU shows how to select the license appropriate to your needs. You are of course free to decide not to award a license at all.
All bibliographic metadata on Open Access LMU except the abstracts are available free of charge under the license "Creative Commons — CC0 1.0" for free re-use.
If your publication was created within the framework of EU funding, the "Unit VIII.3 Research Funding" has compiled the most important information on the Open Access publication of your research results in the following factsheet:
If you would like to upload your publication to "Open Access LMU", you will be asked for the details of your EU-funded project during the upload process:
If you have any questions about the publication process, or should you encounter any technical problems, please contact a member of the Electronic Publications Department:
Universitätsbibliothek der LMU München
Referat für Elektronisches Publizieren
Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1
80539 München
Visitors' address
Leopoldstr. 13
80802 München
Tel: +49-(0)89-2180-3236 / -9485
E-Mail:
Updated: 03. Juni 2019