pedocs

Publishing within pedocs

By publishing your work on the full text server pedocs, you will achieve a broad dissemination of your publication while at the same time you are represented in the context of large educational science portals. Visibility and perception are crucial conditions to a sustainable reception and to integrating results into further research processes and scientific discourse.

By publishing on pedocs, you moreover support the open access approach, targeting free access to scientifically relevant information.

Publishing on pedocs is subject to three steps:

1. Check legal aspects of publication rights

As the author, you grant pedocs a (simple) right of exploitation according to copyright legislation. This right of exploitation comprises an electronic storage for internal administration purposes, making the publication accessible to the general public for individual use, for the use on screen or printing out (online usage) as well as the right to convert the data format for long-term storage and visualisation respectively.

a) This does not constitute a problem if your publication on pedocs is an original /primary publication that has not been issued elsewhere yet.

b) If you plan to issue your publication in open access format as well as in another format, you should obtain information regarding your publisher?s open access strategy even before contacting them, and indicate your intention right from the start. Please check the publishing house contract with respect to restricting expressions such as "without limitation of location", "exclusive", and delete these wordings. If a publisher is granted exclusive rights, these should be limited as regards location and time. Please indicate the amendments in a covering letter, and inform the publishers as to when you wish to provide for an open access publication. In most cases, it is possible to find an open access solution in a joint venture with the publisher. Please convey your awareness of the publisher's interests.

For an overview of open access policies endorsed by diverse publishers, you can consult the SHERPA/RoMEO-Database. Licensing the work, for instance by Creative Commons, includes an agreement on document server publishing. If possible, we recommend publishing under a Creative Commons-BY-license (CC-BY). If you belong to an institution such as an university, you can use a tool from the Electronic Journals Library (EZB) to check whether your publication could be published on peDOCS based on the Open Access rights from alliance and national licenses stored in the EZB.

c) If the rights to a publication have already been assigned to a third party, e.g. a publishing house, you should take care that the contract with your publishing house allows for providing digital author copies via a document server, or that the contract can be amended accordingly, or the publishing house convention allows for such a provision.

For publications issued before 1995 thus existing at a time when electronic publications were unknown as a type of use, and thus could not be considered in a contract, the right to such publication types was retrospectively assigned to the publishing houses provided that the authors had not claimed their right to such publication types by March 2008. In cases of doubt, please consult your publisher regarding your wish and solve any remaining questions.

You will find further information regarding legal aspects of open access publishing on the open-access.network platform.

2. Create a PDF file from your document

We require a PDF/A or at least a PDF file for publishing your document on pedocs, containing your text. This file should not be restricted by protection/security settings, such as requiring a password. Furthermore, all of the typefonts and parts of the contents should be comprised in the document file.

More information and hands-on technical advice on creating PDF/A files in German are provided by Westfälische Wilhelms-University Münster. Information on the creation of barrier-free pdfs can be found in the Guidelines of the RepManNet AG Barrierefreiheit (in German).

3. Publish your publication within pedocs

Please follow the link "to Publish" and thus enter the registration mode, following the step-by-step guide to publishing. You will find detailed explanations regarding the individual aspects of registration here. Apart from uploading the file that contains the actual work itself, you will need to enter several related details . Please make sure the information you give is complete and accurate. If necessary, the data will be further edited prior to finally registering the publication on pedocs.

Please take care that each individual contribution is supplied with a title in its own right that is explicit and comprehensible, regardless of whether it is a journal article or an excerpt from a serial work.

In order to conclude the registration procedure, please confirm acceptance of the author's contract, thereby granting us the necessary rights of exploitation.

If you have any remaining questions or comments subsequent to registering the publication, you are welcome to send us an e-mail on completing the form. We will contact you as soon as possible.