Policies and Guidelines

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The University of Bern supports open access in the sense of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, which it signed in 2007, and has declared open access to be a strategic goal. The open access policy is in line with the open access guidelines of the Rectors' Conference of the Swiss Universities (CRUS), the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) and the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences (SAGW). It does not affect either the free choice of publication organs or the freedom of research.

Open Access Policy of the University of Bern

The University has approved the following guidelines:

  1. The University of Bern requires its researchers to deposit a full version of all peer-reviewed and published academic work and the corresponding bibliographical information in the institutional repository of the University of Bern. This makes the academic work publicly available through Open Access, provided that there are no legal obstacles.
  2. The University of Bern encourages its researchers to publish their research results in Open Access journals, where appropriate journals exist.
  3. As of the 2014 reporting year, research evaluation and academic reports at the University of Bern are supported by the institutional repository of the University of Bern.

The University of Bern supports the implementation of these guidelines by operating an institutional repository which allows the University’s researchers to deposit their publications and the corresponding metadata.

Clarifications on practical implementation:

  • In relation to publishers, researchers retain the right to make their publications publicly accessible via the University of Bern repository – after the expiry of any applicable embargo period.
  • If this option is not available, the bibliographical information of the publications is deposited together with a full version of the text, which is protected from public access in the repository. 

Guidelines

Guidelines for research data management

With these guidelines on research data management (RDM), the data stewards of the Open Science team at Bern University Library aim to support researchers from all faculties of the University of Bern and Inselspital with research data management throughout the entire project life cycle. This includes ethical data collection, data reuse, data generation and processing, data documentation and the preparation of data and metadata as well as code and software for publication.

Research Data Management Guideline (PDF, 157KB)