Project background

Starting position

Because of the steadily increasing acceptance of scholarly articles made available to the public under the open-access paradigm -- a paradigm which stands for free and unrestricted access to scholarly knowledge -- the underlying conceptual, organisational and technical infrastructure is of great importance. On the one hand, it is essential to provide comprehensive and up-to-date information on open access in the individual disciplines. On the other hand, openly-accessible journal articles etc. have to be integrated in specially-designed infrastructures and these must be linked up to existing sources of scholarly information.

The portal open-access.net, launched in May 2007 and like SSOAR funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), plays a pioneering role in German-speaking regions in providing information on open access and connecting the various actors. However, in contrast to the fields of mathematics and physics for example, the social sciences, economics and the humanities still lack an international infrastructure to facilitate the exploitation of the full potential of open access.

While most of the existing open-access repositories were established in individual universities, the DFG report, Publication Strategies in Transformation? which was published in 2005, underlines the fact that scholars and scientists would welcome integrated discipline-specific repositories (see Types of repositories).

Mandate and goal

The DFG-funded project "Social Science Open Access Repository" aims to respond to this demand and to build on work done by its project partners by setting up a discipline-specific repository for the social sciences which will bring manuscripts from German and non-German-speaking authors together in one archive and link them to other openly-accessible material and scholarly information resources.  

Our goal is to counter the fragmentation of the open-access scene, to improve the international visibility of research findings, and to develop a uniform method of handling openly-accessible scholarly literature. The required conceptional and organisational models and the necessary technical infrastructure will be developed and tested using qualitative research as a prototype. This field was chosen because it is both internationally relevant and interdisciplinary. After the pilot phase, SSOAR's scope will be extended to encompass the social sciences as a whole and the fields of economics and the humanities.