About OAAdviceRepositoriesRepublicationsOA 1000+

Open Access repositories are document servers where Open Access publications are made permanently available online in full text and free of charge – either directly by the authors or by their respective institutions.

OA repositories are usually run by public research institutions and research associations, meaning they are mostly used for non-profit purposes.
Making scientific publications freely accessible via repositories has multiple benefits, including, most importantly:

  • Assigning a persistent identifier (DOI, Handle, URN etc.) to a digital object ensures that individual publications can be clearly identified in citations and are permanently available online.
  • By embedding repositories in numerous online search environments, the publications deposited there are referenced at multiple sites on the Internet and hence easier to find.

Publications from WZB research

The Research Information Unit systematically deposits Open Access publications by WZB researchers in the subject-based EconStor repository, where they can be downloaded by all interested persons. In the German-speaking research community, EconStor is among the most prestigious Open Access document servers in terms of visibility, usability, and reliability. 

All WZB research publications deposited in EconStor are also referenced in many other online search environments and hence can be found and downloaded there as well. In addition to the WZB Online Catalog and the WZB Publication Search, this includes search engines like Google and Google Scholar and the following external sources:

OA publications emerging from WZB research are made accessible in cooperation with various infrastructure units of the Leibniz Association and especially with the German National Library of Economics – Leibniz Information Center for Economics (ZBW), which operates the subject-based repository EconStor.

Detailed information on OA repositories is available at http://open-access.net/DE-EN/information-on-open-access/repositories.

If you have questions or comments, please contact us (openaccess [at] wzb.eu).