The global scientific communication system is currently undergoing fundamental changes. Due to the new possibilities that the internet and other information and communication technologies offer, and also to the scientists’ and scholars’ changing requirements, new distribution and dissemination channels appear in addition to the classical publishing houses. A leading development of the past years is the global Open Access movement that is committed to making scientific information, especially scientific and scholarly publications, available free of charge.
Most scientific and scholarly institutions have reacted to this and installed publication infrastructures in the form of so called document and publication servers, thus creating the possibility to make scientific and scholarly publications available online for a worldwide audience and to archive them. Not only the Wissenschaftsrat (German Science Council) and the Hochschulrektorenkonferenz (Conference of University Rectors in Germany) require this, but the funding organizations such as the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF; Federal Ministry of Education and Research) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG; German Research Foundation) support this as a current task.
It is important that this development is in accordance with international standards and based on proven technologies. It is only in this manner that visibility and impact of the individual scientist’s/scholar’s work can be maximized and the research results of universities or other research institutions be globally and adequately recognized.
To accompany the numerous developments in Germany and to define general requirements for publication infrastructures DINI's working group for Electronic Publishing embraced this topic early on and in 2002 published its first recommendations for “Electronic Publishing in Higher Education” . Based on these, the working group formulated criteria and formalized them in the “DINI Certificate for Document and Publishing Services”. Following the 2004 and 2007 editions, 2010 is the third edition. The certificate describes technical as well as organizational and legal aspects that should be considered when setting up and running a sustained Document and Publication Service.
While the 2004 edition's focus was on so called university document servers–meaning mostly university publishing platforms for theses and dissertations–the 2007 edition paid more regard to the global Open Access activities, especially the so-called “green road”. The “green road” describes making a publication available online by self archiving them on institutional or disciplinary repositories parallel to or after publishing the same work elsewhere. This concerns most of all preprints and postprints of academic articles, but also other publication types such as monographs, research reports and conference proceedings. Additionally, the DINI Certificate 2007 edition addressed scientific and scholarly institutions of all kinds and emphasized the service character that should drive a Document and Publication Service .
This new 2010 edition especially incorporates the following aspects and developments:
- The growing importance of the “golden road” to Open Access. This second main strategy in Open Access is the primary publication of scientific articles in Open Access journals, but in principle includes Open Access publication of other document types (e. g. monographs, anthologies) as well. Analog to print publications these primary online publications usually undergo a quality assurance process for the most part in so-called peer-review processes. The German Science Foundation support Open Access publication with a structure-forming funding procedure. The 2010 edition of the certificate for Document and Publication Services also includes the golden road to Open Access along institutional (e. g. university publishing houses) or discipline specific lines.
- The increased demand for interoperability with comprehensive services. These services–especially search and catalog but also other added-value services–are especially important for locally provided publications. They are being implemented mostly within service-oriented infrastructures for electronic publications; on a national level this is the case in the Open Access Netzwerk project, on a European level within the DRIVER project. The quality of these services depends on the provided data and their standardization. Against this background, this certificate edition's guidelines for the OAI interface were amended and adapted to the DRIVER Guidelines.
- The growing technical virtualization of Document and Publication Services; this includes the use of one technical infrastructure by many Document and Publication Services. Despite this development, modularizing the certificate was refrained from. However, the option exists that more than one person can fill out the application form, should competencies and responsibilities for the operation of a Document and Publication Service be divided among more than one institution.
- A comprehensive view of the scientific and scholarly research processes. In addition to the text-oriented publications as the “classical” products of scientific and scholarly communication this brings their bases and production stages into the picture. Especially scientific data and research data resp., their organization and their use are of increasing importance for further research . Science's ever progressing digitization and the virtual research environments it creates give rise to new possibilities in dealing with these data and open up innovative paths in research to scientists and scholars. The collaborative evaluation of research data in international and interdisciplinary projects is but one example for the possibilities of a digital research data management. The DINI Certificate's new edition, like the earlier editions, centers on Document and Publication Services that focus on the provision of text-oriented publications. However, the analog transfer of each individual criterion's requirements and recommendations allows for the certification of data-oriented publication services as well.
In addition to the above, this new edition represents a consolidation and a consistent development of the criteria and the requirements therein. The consequent new phrasing of the individual minimum requirements and the recommendations led to a convergence with the questionnaire that the applicants have to fill out, as they now read like a checklist.
This 2010 edition of the DINI Certificate for Document and Publication Services, the third edition, makes allowances for the listed current international developments and describes how a Document and Publication Services can support the Open Access publishing of a scholarly work in a standardized way. Modularizing the certificate was deliberately abstained from to emphasize the necessity of common standards and procedures in the scholarly research processes. The certificate’s authors and reviewers are aware that discipline-specific factors might oppose a standardization in the narrower sense.
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