Publishing

Bachelor and Master Theses

Bachelor or master theses may be published on the Ostfalia OPUS server if the author holds all necessary rights and fulfils department requirements. An abstract and keywords help users find your paper.

Ostfalia staff publications

If you are a member of staff you are welcome to publish your documents (incl. multimedia content) on our OPUS server. Publishing research results digitally in a so-called institutional repository is a modern alternative to traditional forms of publication. It offers a number of advantages:

• Better visibility (Google Scholar specifically harvests institutional repositories)
• Fast and free publication
• Comfortable import and export of bibliographic data from and to Citavi (in the near future)
• You can export lists of publications for evaluation purposes
• Automatically updated links to OPUS on personal homepage possible
• Digital preservation and automatic backup of documents on a German server
• Fulfils criteria for open access archiving set by funding agencies such as the EU, DFG or the Wellcome Trust

DOIs and URNs

Because URLs are unreliable so-called persistent digital identifiers are used to reliably locate a digital document. DOIs are in wide use mainly to identify academic, professional, and government information, such as journal articles, research reports and data sets, and official publications. We work with the TIB Hannover - a main supplier of DOIs in Germany. URNs are similar and are supplied by the German National Library to every full-text document published on our server.

VG Wort

The VG Wort is a German copyright collecting agency acting on behalf of copyright holders. If you publish a document online you might be entitled to notify the agency about this. Information (in German) is available on the German library website or directly from the agency.

Licenses

For any publisher, author, or user of academic research, clear licensing policies are essential to ensure that everyone knows the legal permissions and requirements relating to the work. CC licenses are well established legal tools worldwide to ensure that the owner of the copyright of a work is clearly identified and the conditions for using the work are clearly known.

You as the author decide how your documents can be used by readers and what rights you want to grant them. For original documents you can chose any of the Creative Commons licenses. The CC-BY license for scholarly content is strongly recommended by the open access community, however, it is your decision which of the licenses you would like to chose.

If you would like to archive an already published document and make it available open access you can consult us to see if this is possible. Many publishers allow archiving a version of the published article in an institutional repository as long as certain conditions are met (see Sherpa/Romeo list or ask your library). http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/search.php

If you would like to publish the metadata only (bibliographic data) for use in a lists of publications you can insert a link to the published document in “Quelle” and use our icon for “ Deutsches Urheberrecht” to indicate that German copyright law applies.

Need help?

If you have questions or are unsure about any aspects of the publishing process or OPUS don’t hesitate to contact the library: opus@ostfalia.de