The basic requirement for excellence in research is the optimal availability of quality-assured scientific information. Therefore, GESIS supports an Open Access policy for the Social Sciences and urges its scientists to make their publications freely available over the internet. This can be done either as Gold Open Access, i.e., in a genuine Open Access medium; or as green Open Access, i.e., as part of a mostly time-delayed secondary publication/archiving in a repository. For this purpose, GESIS runs the Social Science Open Acces Repository (SSOAR), which serves to inquiry freely available full texts on the one side, and to archive publications on a long term-basis on the other side. In addition, GESIS operates the central Open Access gateway of the Leibniz Association LeibnizOpen, in which all freely available publications from the Leibniz Association are listed. GESIS supports the financing of publications in Open Access journals.

• GESIS calls on its authors to make their research results freely available on the internet, and when concluding publishing contracts, to reserve a royalty-free, spatially unlimited, simple and sublicensable right of use, limited to the duration of the property right for archiving their research results in a repository.
• GESIS expects its employees to use their secondary use/self-archiving possibilities, in particular the secondary publication right (Article 38,4 UrhG/Copyright Act) which came into force in 2014, to archive their publications on a repository, e.g., SSOAR.
• GESIS supports publications in genuine Open Access journals by participating in the Leibniz Open Access Publishing Fund and by its funds, from which GESIS employees can apply for the payment of publication fees (APC).
• In the context of third-party funding applications, GESIS recommends its employees to apply for separate publishing funds for the Open Access publication of project related publications.
• All employees involved in the collection of research data are called on to work towards archiving and publishing the research data. It is recommended to seek advice from the Data Archive department already in the planning stage of the data collection.
• GESIS supports its researchers in the clarification of legal and technical questions about Open Access through information and consulting services.

GESIS also actively supports the publication of research data through the services of the Data Archive for the Social Sciences and the data registration agency da|ra.

Publication series and journals published by GESIS (HSR, mda and ISS) are available online, usually via SSOAR.