About SSOAR

As an open-access full-text server, SSOAR's goal is to implement the "green road" to open access by providing users with free electronic access to journal article preprints and postprints  -- our main focus -- and also to other document types.

SSOAR is especially committed to the archiving and dissemination of quality-controlled texts. In order to guarantee compliance with formal and technical standards and quality criteria for open-access repositories, we aim also to obtain certification by DINI, the German Initiative for Networked Information, as soon as possible.

During the two-year term of the project (2007-2008), SSOAR will be implemented using qualitative research as a prototype. We will start 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 on qualitative research. Documents by non-German-speaking contributors will follow.

The project is coordinated by an editorial team and will be supported by an Advisory Board made up of members of scholarly societies. In addition, SSOAR aims to engage in cooperation with numerous journals, publishers and other institutions.

The first documents are available online since January 2008. You as an author are kindly invited to upload your texts. Further papers will be recruited in consultation with authors and journal editors. And, of course, manuscripts may be submitted directly to SSOAR's editorial team. Furthermore we would appreciate your personal promotion of SSOAR.