EconStor Policy

  • Complete series and e-journals from universities, research institutes, publishing houses and other publishers can be imported automatically and continuously into EconStor. The EconStor team offers a full service approach, including the processing of title data and the uploading of full-texts (PDF files). The institution responsible for publishing the series or the e-journal signs a usage agreement.
    Submissions from institutions/publishers
  • Authors can also upload individual publications into EconStor by themselves. Only documents in English or German are accepted for self-upload. Basic title data must be entered for the upload. Descriptive data will be checked by the EconStor team before documents are released. In the course of submission, a deposit licence must be concluded. In case of doubt Papers submitted to EconStor will be screened for plagiarism using the Docoloc plagiarism detection tool.
    Submissions from authors
  • Article
  • Book Part
  • Working Paper/Preprint
  • Conference Paper
  • Doctoral Thesis
  • Book
  • Research Report
  • Proceedings
  • Book Review
  • Contribution to Periodical

Articles from journals and edited volumes are acceptable for EconStor in the original version of their first publication as well as in so-called “postprints” (identical author’s versions of articles from publishers’ journals).

At the website "SHERPA/RoMEO:Publisher copyright policies & self-archiving", authors can find out whether a publisher permits parallel, free publication of articles on a subject repository/publication server such as EconStor, as well as which version may be used for such publication, i.e. the original publisher's version or the postprint.

Submitting authors must be employees of an academic institution (inside or outside a university). Providing an e-mail address for registration that can be attributed to such an institution is considered sufficient proof. Documents must be submitted in "Portable Document Format" (PDF) only. Submissions can only be accepted from graduates in economics or the social sciences. Student term papers, or bachelor, master and "Diplom" theses cannot be accepted.

Documents must be submitted in "Portable Document Format" (PDF) only. In order to ensure long-term preservation of the digital publications, submitted PDF files must not be password-protected.

When self-archiving their publications, authors transfer rights by agreeing to the "EconStor Deposit Licence" during the upload process. The copyright to the submitted work will remain with the author(s). Disseminating papers through EconStor does not preclude further publication of the submitted documents in journals or on other document servers. Authors and/or publishers of electronic documents are responsible for safeguarding that publishing their documents on EconStor does not and will not violate third party rights (copyrights or usage rights).

Publishers of series, journals or conference proceedings can conclude usage agreements with the ZBW in order to have these titles fully documented on EconStor.

Modified texts – such as revised versions of already published working papers – are regarded as new documents and will be indexed, stored and made available as such. At the author's or another authorised person's request, the withdrawal of published documents for important reasons is possible, but will be executed exclusively by the EconStor team. In order to maintain stable linking, only the PDF full-text will be removed; the corresponding bibliographic record will remain on EconStor. Requests for removal must be addressed to .

In accordance with our full service offer to editors and publishers, all the bibliographic data for series and journals to be published entirely on EconStor are recorded internally by ZBW staff. If an editor or publisher owns bibliographic metadata in a standardised format like “Dublin Core”, “Marc21” or the RePEc format “ReDIF”, then this data might be used for bulk importing. Documents with no other subject indexing available will be indexed additionally with keywords from the “Standard Thesaurus for Economics” (STW). In case of self-archiving, authors can provide their own keywords and/or subject codes from the “Journal of Economic Literature Classification System” (JEL). The indexing according to the “Dewey Decimal Classification” system (DDC) will be done by ZBW staff only.

The ZBW guarantees unlimited free access and stable linking to all research papers available on EconStor. All documents are signed with an “HDL Identifier” from the Handle.Net Registry as a so-called “Persistent Identifier” to ensure permanently working URLs, and they are authenticated technically through "MD-5 fingerprints". The long-term preservation of digital documents is guaranteed within the framework of the Goportis cooperation with the TIB (Hanover) and ZBMED (Cologne/Bonn). EconStor is operated by the ZBW (Kiel/Hamburg) and can be accessed by the public on the internet 24/7, according to the EconStor terms of use, except at times of maintenance work or in case of technical malfunction.

EconStor provides increased visibility and dissemination of publications within the economic community.

All metadata will be offered to other service providers through a standardised interface consistent with the "Protocol for metadata harvesting" of the "Open Archive Initiative" (OAI-PMH 2.0). (Base URL: http://www.econstor.eu/dspace-oai/request?).

In order to achieve optimal dissemination and visibility of the documents available on EconStor, the corresponding title data will be fed into the following search engines, portals and databases. Depending on the database, data will be provided completely or in defined subsets.

All EconStor titles can be found in Google. Data have been optimised for the comprehensive integration of all EconStor titles into the academic search engine Google Scholar.

On request, EconStor offers German institutions the option of entering title data for entire series and journals into the Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) database at no cost. RePEc is one of the world's largest freely accessible databases in economics. RePEc offers several services that have made it the main database to find and disseminate working papers, articles and conference proceedings. Listing a working paper series or a journal in the RePEc database offers several advantages for the individual paper as well as for the entire series or journal:

  • Direct dissemination of papers within the community through the established and freely accessible RePEc services IDEAS and EconPapers, as well as the RePEc alert service New Economic Papers
  • Detailed download statistics from LogEc
  • Citation analysis and integration into CitEc
  • Integration of the titles into the RePEc Author Services

EconBiz is a portal for literature in Economics and Business Studies operated by the ZBW. The portal offers a central entry point in the search for scholarly economic information with direct access to the full-text wherever possible. The EconBiz search space includes the most important national and international databases in economics. All titles held in EconStor can be found in EconBiz.

LeibnizOpen is the central access point for Open Access publications from researchers of the Leibniz-Gemeinschaft across all disciplines. This database represents the entire bandwidth of research topics in the Leibniz Association. LeibnizOpen is a cooperative effort and offers the combined full-text collections available in the various subject and institutional repositories of the Leibniz institutes. EconStor transfers the title metadata for the Open Access publications of 11 Leibniz institutes into LeibnizOpen.

WorldCat is the world's largest bibliographic online database and includes the catalogue data of thousands of member libraries. EconStor is integrated as a digital collection directly into the WorldCat database.

BASE is one of the world's largest search engines for freely available research papers in Open Access. The search index of BASE bundles the title data of more than 90 million scholarly documents from over 4,000 digital sources. The search engine BASE is operated by the Bielefeld University Library. All EconStor titles can be found in BASE.

The OpenAIRE project aimed to support the implementation of the EC and ERC Open Access policies. During the course of the project, a European Helpdesk System and an e-infrastructure for repositories were built up, as was the OpenAIRE portal, which aggregates the metadata from a wide range of repositories. EconStor is OpenAIRE compliant and offers researchers the option to disseminate EC-funded publications in the OpenAIRE portal.

If you are interested in any of these services or need more information, please contact the EconStor team: .
Additionally, feel free to consult our list of FAQs for more information.