Within the context of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, the IfL is committed to the idea of open access. As stated in the preface, the declaration was elaborated to “promote the Internet as a functional instrument for a global scientific knowledge base and human reflection and to specify measures which should be considered by politicians, research institutions, funding agencies, libraries, archives and museums". At IfL, Open Access constitutes an important educational-political part of its mission for discussing and disseminating its own research findings in the academic world.

Apart from the print version of the IfL-published journal Europa Regional, an additional free version has already been available on the Internet since 2012, and the full version can be downloaded at www.leibniz-ifl.de. All contributions of the peer-reviewed magazine with a focus on regional-geographical themes are registered in the Social Science Open Access Repository (SSOAR) by the GESIS – Leibniz-Institute for Social Sciences. In so doing, the digital preservation of the articles is ensured and they additionally obtain a URN (Uniform Resource Name), thus making them explicitly and permanently identifiable.

The older articles of the quarterly-published magazine are also available online and permanent accessible in the SSOAR repository. Apart from the paper version, the IfL-published forum ifl series has also been freely available on the Internet since number 18 (2012). Furthermore, there are the online offers of IfL such as, for instance, the online-journal Nationalatlas aktuell, with regularly appearing map contributions on a current topic.