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Cooperating with SSOAR

Scholarly publications that are freely available in open access are more readily accessible, easier to process, and achieve a broader reach. By cooperating with publishers, editors, journal editors, and research institutions who wish to make substantial amounts of data (e.g., publication series, journals) available via SSOAR, we are able to make easily searchable, quality-controlled, relevant digital publications freely accessible online to the social science community. To enable uniform citability, we make a conscious effort to make the publishers’ versions available.

Through this cooperation, SSOAR is currently able to provide free access to extensive collections of volumes of over 35 journals and around 70 working paper series.

The advantages for publishers and editors of cooperating with SSOAR are:

                     •    An additional distribution channel for social science scholarly publications

                     •    The increased visibility of the publications in the disciplinary context

                     •    Higher ranking of the indexed titles in search engine queries

                     •    A significant increase in citation rates

 

Moreover, SSOAR is working with the German National Library on the long-term availability of the full texts. By regularly feeding the full texts back into the repository after their migration to new electronic formats, they will continue to be available via SSOAR even in the distant future.

For publishers, another important argument in favour of cooperation with SSOAR is the fact that we guarantee the full protection of copyrights. Regular meetings with publishers together with the education sciences repository pedocs serve to exchange views on the handling of open access to scientific research results as mandated by science organisations and funding institutions.

In the sense of a win-win situation, SSOAR offers a number of different cooperation models and additional, and continuously expanding, services such as monthly download statistics.

With the increasing mandating of open access by research funders, and the so-called “right of secondary publication” that came into effect in 2014, SSOAR supports research institutions in making the publications of their staff members freely accessible to the public online (“secondary publication”) after a corresponding embargo period. Please contact us.

Bulk imports into SSOAR are a good way of making substantial numbers of publications (journal volumes, working paper series/working papers, etc.) freely accessible to the public via SSOAR. Depending on the technical facilities and the format of the data (metadata and full texts), these bulk imports can be realised in different ways. Ideally, data are exported and imported via an OAI-PMH interface. Such web interfaces are usually present when repository software or, for example, Open Journal Systems (OJS) is used to manage and store data on the Internet. You will find an initial overview of ways of delivering data to SSOAR here. Moreover, with the help of third-party-funded projects, we are constantly working on facilitating the import of data into SSOAR.

The prerequisite for cooperation and for importing data into SSOAR is the signing of a customisable standard agreement.