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 and publishers support free access to scientific information and optimised visibility of social science research results. SSOAR primarily pursues the so-called “Green Road to Open Access” (OA) and sees itself as a secondary publisher of quality-controlled literature.

In order to cover the discipline as broadly as possible, SSOAR pursues a number of different content-acquisition strategies. Full texts are deposited, and thus published, either by scientists themselves or by social science research institutions, university faculties, and discipline-specific infrastructure providers via bulk imports or individual imports in collaboration with the repository. Especially within the framework of our collaboration with cooperation partners, over 70 working paper series of renowned institutes, and extensive collections of volumes of over 35 journals are indexed in the repository.

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), and the Leibniz Association’s bibliographic database, LeibnizOpen. 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.