Project background

Starting position

Because of the steadily increasing acceptance of 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 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.

Most of the existing open-access repositories are operated by individual universities. However, in 2005 a DFG report entitled Publication Strategies in Transformation? revealed that there was a strong demand among scholars and scientists for discipline-specific repositories (see Types of repositories). As a discipline-specific full-text server for the social sciences, SSOAR fulfils this demand.

Mandate and goal

In response to the findings of the DFG report, and building on work done by our project partners, a discipline-specific open-access document server for the social sciences was built within the framework of the DFG-funded project "Social Science Open Access Repository" (SSOAR).  SSOAR brings manuscripts from German and non-German-speaking authors together in one archive and integrates them into the collections of openly-accessible publications and scholarly information resources held by institutions such as virtual special libraries.  

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 were developed and tested using qualitative research as a prototype. This field was chosen because it is both internationally relevant and interdisciplinary. The scope of the repository has since been extended to cover all areas of the social sciences.

Implementation

During the two-year term of the project (2007-2008), SSOAR focused on qualitative research. We started by storing manuscripts by German-speaking authors, relying mainly on the network which originates in Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research (FQS), the biggest international open-access journal for qualitative research. Documents by non-German-speaking contributors followed.

The project was coordinated by an editorial team and was supported by an advisory board made up of members of scholarly societies. SSOAR aims to establish cooperation with journals, publishers and other institutional partners.

The first documents became available online in January 2008. GESIS - Leibniz Institute for Social Sciences is responsible for the operation and further development of the repository.

You, as an author, are warmly invited to deposit your texts. Furthermore, we would appreciate it if you would spread the word about SSOAR to your friends and colleagues.