The basic requirement for excellence in research is the availability of quality-assured scientific information. Therefore, GESIS supports an open access policy for the social sciences (which includes running its own diamond open access series) and strongly urges its researchers 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 or archived in a repository. For this purpose, GESIS runs the Social Science Open Access Repository (SSOAR), which serves to offer employees a secondary archiving service that both checks rights and offers the opportunity to create legally compliant post-print versions. 

• GESIS supports publications in genuine and hybrid open access journals by participating in numerous transformation agreements, consortium licenses, and memberships, as well as through independent funds from which GESIS employees can apply for payment of publication charges (APC) for publications outside these agreements.
• GESIS calls on its authors to make their research results freely available online, and, if possible, to reserve a royalty-free, non-exclusive, simple, and sublicensable right of use to archive their research results in a repository for the duration of the intellectual property right.
• For optimal reusability of the published research results in the sense of the FAIR principles, GESIS recommends the allocation of a CC-BY or CC-BY-SA license in its current version.
• 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 in a repository, e.g., SSOAR.
• When applying for third-party funding, 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 Services for the Social Sciences (DSS) department as early as the planning stage of data collection.
• GESIS supports its researchers by providing information on and consulting services for legal and technical questions relating to open access.

GESIS also actively supports the archiving of research datasets.