About the repository

The repository for science and technology serves the free publication of scientific publications in the sense of Open Access and is open to all authors in these fields. The publications deposited in the repository are permanently available and citable. They are indexed by search engines and library catalogs, among others.

Primary and secondary publications can be published. Secondary publications can be entered into the repository as preprints, postprints and also as a final publisher's version, depending, among other things, on what is permitted by any publishing agreement that may have been concluded.

The aim of this TIB service is to make scientific publications available on the Internet for research and teaching purposes in compliance with recognized quality standards, and to guarantee worldwide free and permanent access to these documents. The documents deposited in the repository:

  • are described with high-quality, structured metadata,
  • receive Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) as permanent and stable addresses,
  • are indexed by search engines, national and international library catalogs and other research and reference services.

The TIB ensures long-term archiving and thus guarantees the permanent (unlimited in time) findability as well as citability of the electronic documents brought into the repository. This may require, among other things, transforming the document into technical formats other than the submission format or forwarding it to other servers.

For the operation and further development of the subject repository, recommendations and standardizations of national and international initiatives such as the German Initiative for Network Information (DINI) or the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) are taken into account.

Legal

What do I have to consider?

Scientific publications are usually protected by copyright. If you want to publish a work in the repository, you should therefore make sure that you have the appropriate rights. In particular, you should consider other authors and publishers to whom you may have granted extensive rights of use. Make sure that your co-authors agree to the publication on the repository. Obtain the binding consent of your co-authors.

If you have already published a paper with a publisher and would now like to publish it for the second time via the subject repository, the legal admissibility of the secondary publication must be checked. In general, a secondary publication in a subject repository is possible if:

  • you, as the author, have transferred simple rights of use to the publisher,
  • your publishing contract explicitly states that you are allowed to make your publication available on a (subject) repository (self-archiving),
  • the new statutory second publication right applies to your publication.

When concluding publishing agreements, you can explicitly reserve the rights of use necessary for secondary publication (cf. open-access.net), e.g. by:

  • deletions/insertions in the publishing contract,
  • inserting a contract form to which reference is made in the publishing agreement.

To publish your work in the repository, you must agree to the Deposit License (see below). In addition, it is still possible for you to exploit the works published via the repository yourself (e.g. post them on your own homepage, send them by email, publish them in a journal or in a book).

You can still grant exclusive usage rights to your publication to third parties after (initial) publication on the repository. Please note that in the case of a subsequent publication by a publisher under agreement of exclusive rights of use in favor of the publisher, the publisher must be informed about the publication on the repository prior to the conclusion of the contract.

By granting free licenses such as Creative Commons (see below), barriers to the use of scientific content can be reduced. Often, Creative Commons licenses can no longer be granted for secondary publications if the publisher has been granted exclusive rights to use the publication. Publications that have already been published under a Creative Commons license can be published in the repository under the same license.

Deposit License

In order for your publication to be made publicly available via the repository, you must transfer to the operator of the repository (TIB) a simple right of use - for online provision on the repository - to your publication. This is done by concluding a license agreement, the so-called Deposit License. You can agree to the Deposit License online during the upload process; the confirmation process is integrated into the repository workflow. You can also download the full Deposit License as a PDF: For primary publications and secondary publications respectively.

Creative Commons licenses

In addition to the rights of use granted with the Deposit License, you can grant third parties further rights of use to your publication via Creative Commons Licenses. During the upload process in the repository, you can add a Creative Commons license to your publication.

We recommend - if legally possible - that you assign the Open Access-compatible Creative Commons license "CC Attribution - Germany 3.0“. It provides the fewest restrictions for subsequent use in research and teaching and at the same time ensures that the author must be named.

Publish

What can I publish here?

You can submit to the repository for science and technology all text publications from the relevant subject areas, for example:

  • journal articles and journal issues,
  • books and parts of books,
  • proceedings and congress contributions,
  • reports
  • book series
  • working papers and working paper series
  • dissertations and postdoctoral theses,
  • final theses of students (bachelor, master, diploma, master theses),
  • other text publications

The following conditions must be met by an electronic document if it is to be published via the subject repository:

  • The electronic document is intended for distribution to the public and is not a dynamic document.
  • If the document is published, it can neither be changed nor deleted.
  • If updates are necessary, the modified electronic document is published as a new version.
  • The document is free of technical protection measures.

The preferred submission format for documents is PDF. Instructions for creation/conversion can be found in a tutorial of the University of Potsdam. EPUB, XML and HTML formats are also accepted.

For materials belonging to text publications (supplementary material), special data repositories are to be used primarily. If no suitable data repository is available for your research data, supplementary material can also be submitted to the subject repository. There is no restriction to a specific file format.

How can I publish here?

You can contribute your publications and the associated metadata to the repository yourself via a web form. Before you start the publishing process, the legal framework of your publication should be clarified.

The publishing process itself consists of four steps.

Step 1 - Register/Login

If you want to publish in the repository for the first time, you have to register first. To do this, please enter your email address. You will then receive an email with a link where you can complete your registration.

If you have already registered as a user, please log in. Then you can start submitting the publication.

Step 2 - Submitting a publication

To submit your publication, you can use an online form, with which you can easily and quickly submit your publication in the given steps:

  • assign your publication to one of the specified subject areas,
  • enter descriptive bibliographic information about your publication,
  • select a Creative Commons license, if applicable,
  • upload the electronic full text,
  • check the entered bibliographic information and the uploaded document,
  • confirm the deposit license online directly during the upload.

Step 3 - Validation of the entry

Following the submission process, the bibliographic information is validated and enriched by members of the repository team. In order to achieve an effective content search on a national and international level, each publication is indexed by bibliographic and technical metadata according to the Dublin Core format as well as at least by an abstract, a classification and keywords.

Step 4 - Publication of the electronic document

If all information is complete, your publication and the corresponding metadata are finally released by the repository team. This makes the document and metadata permanently available. You will receive a notification by email.

Using content

All documents that you find in the subject repository have a legal notice. This notice tells you how you can use the corresponding publication.

This may be a free license, such as a Creative Commons license. In this case, you will also find a link to the corresponding license text, which regulates exactly under which conditions you can use and distribute the document.

If no separate usage license has been granted, you will find a reference to the applicable copyright, which generally allows you to use the document yourself, but not to edit or redistribute it further.

The bibliographic information contained in the repository is made available to you under the CC0 1.0 Universal license.


The subject repository for science and technology is operated by the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB).

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us: renate@tib.eu.