The full-text server SSOAR, which is maintained at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, collects and archives literature of relevance to the social sciences and makes it available in open access on the Internet in accordance with the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.

By archiving works in SSOAR, authors, publishers, and editors support free access to scientific information and enhance the visibility of social science research results.

Publishing full texts is open to researchers, social science research institutions, academic chairs, publishers, and specialized infrastructure providers. Authors can upload individual publications directly via the SSOAR website. Additionally, we offer institutions the option of bulk importing publications. For editors of Diamond Open Access journals, we serve as an infrastructure for long-term archiving within the collaborative publishing process. Through such cooperations, SSOAR archives more than 75 working paper series from renowned institutes and over 35 journals with comprehensive annual volumes. The direct publication of peer-reviewed series in SSOAR is also becoming increasingly popular. Publications can be integrated into individual web presences via their assigned Persistent Identifier (PID).

Full texts are indexed using controlled social science vocabulary (Thesaurus, Classification) and are assigned rich metadata. Hence, in addition to thematic searches in SSOAR, full texts are found very well using Google and other search engines and are ranked higher in the search engine’s results.

The repository makes metadata available to Open Archives Initiative (OAI) service providers such as the Bielefelder Academic Search Engine (BASE) and other portals, for example, the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (German Digital Library). This further enhances the visibility of the full texts in SSOAR, for example in the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) and the Open Access Netzwerk (OAN).

Each electronic document is assigned a URN (Uniform Resource Name), which is a persistent identifier (PID) that enables unequivocal and permanent access to the publication and its scientific citation.

SSOAR has been certified by the German Initiative for Network Information (DINI). The DINI Certificate ensures the standardisation and quality of OA repositories.