Open Access Policy

GAIA - Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society and oekom are happy to support open access and thus the goal of the widest possible dissemination of scholarly content.

Green Open Access

GAIA follows the Green Road to Open Access.

  • Authors can archive the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) and/or Version of Record (VoR) for free public use on personal or institutional websites and/or in any open access institutional repository immediately after publication.
  • No embargo period.
  • Authors retain copyright: All articles are published under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution license CC BY 4.0.
  • We strongly encourage researchers to self-archive their articles in a repository. Information on repositories can be found >here.
  • This policy is fully compliant with Plan S (repository route).

Gold Option

GAIA also offers a Gold Option: With this option, authors pay a basic fee and in return readers have free access to their articles.

Pricing for Gold Option

Our services include the organization of the review and publication process, editing, layout and graphics. GAIA articles are abstracted and indexed in various scientific databases (including Web of Science; Current Contents/Social and Behavioral Science; Science Citation Index Expanded; Social Science Citation Index; Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (CSA), CAB Abstracts, EBSCO and Scopus); in order to promote the journal and its content, we will send out press releases, newsletters and social media posts, and our editors will attend relevant conferences and meetings to promote the journal and the featured content. There are also costs associated with printing, distribution and hosting. In order to maintain our high quality standards and cover our costs, we offer the Gold Option per published article as follows:

  • Forum section: 400 EUR (VAT not included)
  • Research section: 900 EUR (VAT not included)

A summary of GAIA's open access policy is also available at Sherpa Romeo.

Preprint / Postprint and Self-Archiving Policies

Authors are encouraged to share their research (preprint and postprint) as well as to submit their published articles to institutional repositories. Preprints are all versions of an article that were written before peer review. Postprints are all versions after going through the peer review process. Depending on the article version, the following article-sharing and self-archiving policies apply:

Preprints and Submitted Version: Authors can share their submitted version anywhere at any time. If accepted for publication, the published scource must be acknowledged and the submitted version must be linked to the formal publication via its Digital Object Identifier (DOI). Submitted versions should not be added to or enhanced in any way in order to appear more like, or to substitute for, the final versions of articles.

Postprints - Accepted Version (Author Accepted Manuscript, AAM): Authors can archive their Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) for free public use on personal or institutional websites and/or in any open access institutional repository under a CC BY license with no embargo period. After publication, the published source must be acknowledged and the accepted version must be linked to the Version of Record (VoR) via its Digital Object Identifier (DOI). Accepted versions should not be added to or enhanced in any way in order to appear more like, or to substitute for, the VoR.

Postprints - Published Version (Version of Record, VoR): Authors can archive their Version of Record (VoR) for free public use on personal or institutional websites and/or in any open access institutional repository under a CC BY license with no embargo period. The published source must be acknowledged with citation and must link to the published article with DOI.