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Publishing in SSOAR

By making your research results available via SSOAR, you, as an author, a research institution, or a publisher, support free access to social science publications and achieve optimum and lasting visibility for your publications on the Internet.

SSOAR primarily pursues the so-called “Green Road to Open Access” and sees itself as a secondary publisher of literature that has already undergone quality control elsewhere. We publish preprints, postprints, and publishers’ versions of published works. You can also use SSOAR to publish a work for the first time. However, because submissions to SSOAR do not undergo scientific or editorial review, these primary publications are identified via the metadata as a “non-peer-reviewed” primary publication.

The following document types can be archived in SSOAR and made available to the public:

  • Journal articles and contributions to edited volumes
  • Contributions to working papers; working paper series (grey literature
  • Monographs and edited volumes
  • Theses and dissertations

To submit a work for publication, please use the add new document function. First, the metadata and the licence you wish to grant are collected via an online form, Then, the full text in PDF format is uploaded. And finally, to complete the self-archiving procedure, the terms of use agreement (165 kB) must be confirmed by ticking the appropriate box. To use the self-archiving function you must register with SSOAR once with your email address.

Description of Full Texts with Metadata, Grant of Licence, Persistent Identifier (PID)

To achieve optimum visibility on the Internet, full texts are tagged with extensive metadata in the course of their being made available via SSOAR. In addition to the title and the abstract, keywords (especially from the thesaurus for the social sciences, TheSoz) are an important prerequisite for differentiated searching. We therefore recommend that, in addition to your own keywords, you assign at least five keywords from the Thesaurus. Moreover, you decide under which licence your full text is to be published in SSOAR. We recommend – where possible – that you publish your work under a CC-BY licence. Upon release, each electronic document is assigned a URN (Unique Resource Name), which is a persistent identifier (PID) that enables unequivocal and permanent access to the publication and its scientific citation. In the case of preprints and postprints of published works, you are requested to also indicate the PID of the publisher’s version (as a rule, this is a Digital Object Identifier [DOI]).

Cover Page

Each full text archived in SSOAR is assigned a cover page that includes the main metadata, citation information, and the licence/terms and conditions of use for the end user.

Archiving in PDF Format

In order to offer users of SSOAR good quality, only PDF – ideally PDF/A – files – are archived. The files may not be protected by a password or be subject to any further security restrictions. Moreover, all fonts used must be embedded. It is best to use standard fonts and to specify the language in the document properties. The full-text server of the Humboldt Universität Berlin provides information about the PDF standard and instructions for creating PDF files (available in German only).

Scope of the Repository

As a disciplinary repository for the social sciences, SSOAR publishes discipline-relevant scientific publications from the social sciences – in particular, sociology and political science and their methods, social policy, social psychology, population research, historical social research, employment research, and communication sciences. As a rule, German- and English-language publications can be archived in SSOAR. Decisions to include publications from the peripheral areas of the aforementioned disciplines, or publications in other languages, are made on request on a case-by-case basis. Please also read our Guidelines.
In the case of publications from the field of economics, education sciences, and psychology, please contact the respective disciplinary repositories EconStor, pedocs and PsyDok.

Grant of Rights

When you publish your work via SSOAR, you grant GESIS, as the operator of the repository, a non-exclusive right of use in the work in accordance with copyright law, thereby allowing us to store the full text, make it available for online use (to view, download, and print), and convert it into other data formats for the purpose of long-term archiving. Moreover, via the terms of use agreement or the cooperation agreement GESIS is granted the right to use the full text for the purpose of information science research and text- and data mining activities. We do this in order to continuously optimise our services and, for example, to link full texts with the underlying research data sets that are cited in the text itself and are available in open access. Please check, if necessary with the help of our Guidelines, whether your are entitled to grant GESIS a non-exclusive right of use in the work. In the case of a work by multiple authors, please also check whether all the authors consent to your making the work available in open access in SSOAR.

Release by the SSOAR Team

Before the publication is made freely available to the public on the Internet, the metadata are checked by the SSOAR team and supplemented with a classification and, if necessary, further information. It is then released. The moment it is released, you receive an email with the personalised terms of use agreement and a stable, citable link to your publication.

Cooperating with SSOAR

Publishers, journal editors, and research institutions who wish to make a substantial number of publications (journal volumes, working paper series, etc.) available to the public via SSOAR (“secondary publication”) can find the necessary information under the menu item: Cooperating with SSOAR.