The project Open Gender Platform aims to foster the German-speaking gender studies community’s transition to open access, while connecting existing open access projects within this academic field.

The main focus of the project was to develop a publication infrastructure that makes both scientific results and publications of gender studies freely accessible and easily usable. Therefore, the goal of the project was to provide a common home for all open access activities within German-speaking gender studies and provide for the publication needs of this community. Such needs include facilitating exchanges between heterogeneous structures of knowledge production, disseminating resources within a multidisciplinary field, and pursuing more open formats of publishing informed by community-based reflections on accessibility and exclusion.

The project had a practical aim of implementing, promoting, and cultivating the aforementioned publication contexts, and offered training and supervision services to these ends. Additionally, the project’s structure encouraged continuous evaluation and networking, with consecutive work packages designed to systematically address the publication and reception processes that are of vital importance for modernizing the publication habits within gender studies.

Essential to this modernization and its eventual acceptance were the project’s evaluation and preparation of technical publication infrastructures, the integration of up-to-date publication and review formats, the development of accessible style sheets and layouts, and the establishment of support networks (i.e. a comprehensive scientific board, a reviewer database, etc.). Committed to maximal transparency, the project’s progress and results were continuously published open access, advertised within the field of gender studies, and critically discussed with the scientific community.

Beyond this concrete research framework, there is hope that the project encouraged an earnest dialogue on the publication habits within gender studies and the field’s opinions towards open access publishing. For example: How should open, transparent, and participatory formats be implemented? What unique contribution can gender studies make to the free, open exchange of information given its heterogenous structures and diverse cultures of knowledge production? Is there a way to increase the process quality and visibility of gender research results through models of open access publishing?

The project was funded within the framework of the "Funding programme for the free flow of information in science - Open Access" of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and supported by the German Gender Studies Association, which took over the responsibility for the project, after the Open Gender Platform ended in October 2020.

The website of the Open Gender Platform, which went online in September 2019, offers Open Access formats and tools such as an open database for reviewers and the Schlagwortindex GenderOpen, a keyword index for gender studies. By providing information on technologies, business models and quality assurance, editors and authors from gender studies are given sustainable support for the transformation to open scientific publishing.

Please visit Open Gender Platform at:  https://opengenderplatform.de/