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Open Access Guidelines


With the aim of promoting scientific and scholarly Open Access publishing without technical or legal barriers, Potsdam University Library, as the provider of the Publication Server, sets the following conditions:

  1. Publishing on the institutional repository requires the permanent transfer of the simple right of online publication for public access from the authors to the provider. Beyond that, authors are free to publish the complete work as a pre- or postprint without any restrictions elsewhere, before or after its release on the institutional repository, in print or online. The work can also be published in a modified form or in excerpts.

  2. The results of indexing and especially the bibliographical metadata of the documents published on the institutional repository can be accessed, saved and distributed, if applicable, in an enriched form or as a selection, by everyone through an OAI interface. Metadata is licensed under the Creative Commons License CC0 1.0 Universal. In case of primary publication on the institutional repository, a link in form of a URL or URN to the front-door of the resource on the institutional repository should be included.

  3. The University Library Potsdam encourages authors to assign a Creative Commons Licence complying with Open Access in order to dismantle barriers of copyright law for the free circulation of ideas and the distribution of research results. The rights of the author are preserved in this case because of the obligation to state the name of the author and the optional exclusion of a commercial use. In case of the distribution of the unedited document, the Uniform Resource Name (URN) should be used to ensure an unambiguous identification of the internet resource.

  4. The published documents are generally free of technical protective devices and methods of digital rights management (DRM) in order preserve them as part of the digital cultural heritage and to make them available to the scientific community as well as the public.

  5. For increasing the visibility of the service, the institutional repository is registered with the directories of Open Access journals Open Access Repositories (ROAR) and Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR).

  6. The institutional repository is an online service of Universitätsverlag Potsdam (University Press). It is listed at its own proposal as a Green Press in the SHERPA/RoMEO directory.