DINI-Certificate Document and Publication Services 2007

Abstract

Installing and institutionalising document and publication repositories at universities creates the opportunity to archive scholarly publications that were produced at the respective universities and to offer them to a worldwide audience. This new service offered by libraries and computing centres as infrastructure facilities helps disseminate the idea of electronic publishing as a new tool for academic work. DINI, the Deutsche Initiative für Netzwerkinformation (German Initiative for Network Information), supports this to reach a higher level of scientific and scholarly communication both nationally and internationally. To reach this goal it is necessary to create a network of Document and Publication Services. A network of local publication repositories complements the dominant (commercial) publications of publishing houses, and can therefore have a regulating function against the monopolistic tendencies in scholarly publishing. The German Science Council and the Conference of University Rectors in Germany call for the installation of Document and Publication Services, funding institutions such as the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (Federal Ministry of Education and Research) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) support (and fund) this. It is important to develop these services according to international standards and on the basis of proven technologies. It is only in this manner that the worldwide visibility and impact of the scholarly work of the individual scientist and scholar, as well as that of an entire university, can be improved. This second edition of the ‘DINI-Certificate Document and Publication Services’ includes current international developments, describes how Document and Publication Services support the open-access publication of scholarly documents, and shows how as Institutional Repositories they can position themselves in their respective institutions, especially with regard to supporting scholars and scientists to make pre and post prints of their documents available that have already been published by publishing houses – free of time or space constraints. The DINI-Certificate 2007 aims for the following: *Provide a detailed description of the requirements of certified Document and Publication Services, *Position Document and Publication Services as an Institutional Repository, *Highlight development directions in the areas of developing services and of information exchange, *Offer a visible reference to both users and providers to certify the adherence to defined standards and recommendations by the respective Document and Publication Services. By issuing this certificate, DINI offers a quality control for Document and Publication Services. A set of mandatory minimum requirements of a service and its provider must be attained, prior to the award of the DINI Certificate. Fulfilling these requirements is essential in order to allow modern scholarly communication. At the same time, DINI makes recommendations with regard to foreseeable developments that might become future requirements. A working group within DINI verifies the criteria for the DINI Certificate against international standards and developments and updates them accordingly. For this reason, the certificate carries a date stamp (year of version). In this second version of the DINI Certificate the name of the certificate has been changed from ‘Document and Publication Repositories’ to ‘Document and Publication Services’, to clarify that it not only certificates a server, but also serverbased services.