Cooperation

From the very beginning, our aim has been to develop SSOAR in cooperation with institutions, academic committees, journals, publishers, research groups and individuals. Concrete agreements relate to making documents available, to quality assurance and editing. The purpose of such cooperation is to ensure the widest possible dissemination of scientific findings, thus increasing their impact.

SSOAR's editorial staff welcomes all cooperation enquiries.

SSOAR has close ties with other open-access repository operators, especially with PsyDok, and with other key open-access actors, above all with the information platform open-access.net in which the Freie Universitaet Berlin and the Universities of Bielefeld, Goettingen and Constance also participate.

In line with the Creative Commons Licence 3.0 under which both projects are licensed, SSOAR has availed of material from open-access.net when gathering information on Open Access in general and on legal issues in particular. This material has been adapted for SSOAR's purposes.

Concrete examples of cooperation

We are conducting talks with relevant journals of qualitative research with a view to convincing them to make their back editions available to SSOAR as postprints. We hope that as many journals as possible will participate in this way and that they will encourage their authors to self-archive. We hope, too, that they will join us in our endeavour to make SSOAR into an important and lasting resource for qualitative research.

We set up separate web pages within SSOAR for those journals which cooperate with us in this way. In addition to the contributions submitted, these customised web environments also feature background information about the respective journals, thus increasing their recognition.

For examples of existing cooperations, see the portal pages of the journal Historical Social Research and the Journal of Psychology. The SSOAR editorial team welcomes enquiries from journal editors and publishers.