FAQ

Publishing on EconStor

Yes. Of course documents on EconStor are copyright-protected. By signing the Deposit Licence, authors grant a simple (non-exclusive) usage right to the ZBW as the operator of EconStor. Users are notified of the EconStor terms of use when they download documents. Documents made available under the terms of the EconStor Deposit Licence can be downloaded, saved and copied by users. EconStor users must not make the documents available elsewhere on the internet.
Yes, publications on EconStor are citable. Please use the suggested citation and the stable link (Handle) of EconStor, which you can find on the cover page.
Yes. You can assign a Creative Commons Licence to your own documents and thus determine the usage rights you wish to grant. Documents published under a CC licence should contain a clearly visible notice and a link to the licence type. The Creative Commons Licence is also captured in a metadata field in EconStor. During submission via self-upload, the standard usage agreement of EconStor must also be signed, even if you grant a CC licence. The two licence types do not contradict each other. On the contrary, the CC licence adds other usage options to the EconStor Deposit Licence. You can find more information and a practical guide to CC licences here.
Yes. We recommend that you use the persistent stable link (Handle.net) of EconStor for forwarding. You can also post documents in various social networks using the share buttons in the EconStor title view.
No. The basic concept of EconStor is to make complete documents available in Open Access. If you wish to build complete publications lists, we refer you to services like EconBiz, RePEc or Google Scholar.
No, we don’t know of any case, where a paper is rejected by a journal, because it was available on EconStor before. In Economics we have a publication culture, where most research findings are published first as working, discussion or conference papers. The idea behind that is to present new ideas first and claim authorship for it. The scholarly evaluation of these ideas and findings is then conducted by academic journals in their peer review process. The „preprint culture“ is therefore accepted by Editors of Economics Journals.
No, EconStor is a subject-based repository and not an academic journal. We check every uploaded paper concerning its suitability for our disciplinary profile and formal aspects like grammar or spelling mistakes, but we do not evaluate the content.
Yes. Detailed download numbers and rankings are shown for single titles, institutions, collections and for EconStor overall. The COUNTER standard rules apply to the collation of download numbers. You can find more information under Usage Statistics.
The EconStor team usually accepts series such as working or discussion papers and e-journals as complete collections. EconStor handles the entire process from producing all title data and additional information like abstracts, keywords and JEL codes to the final uploading of PDF files. Documents are made available on EconStor based on a usage agreementwhich grants us a simple usage right to make the publications accessible on the internet. If you are the editor or publisher and want to make a series or a journal available on EconStor, please email us at: econstor@zbw-workspace.eu.
EconStor offers a self-upload where authors can submit their own documents. After verification by the editorial team, the documents will be made available on EconStor.

If the obsolete document was previously transferred to EconStor by yourself via self-upload ("EconStor Direct"):
Please resubmit the updated document via self-upload and give us a note about the previous version and whether we should delete it.

If the obsolete document originates from a publication series or conference held entirely on EconStor (ongoing agreement with editors):
Send us the new version of your document at econstor@zbw-workspace.eu. We will create a new title dataset for the document. Previous versions of the document will be deleted at your request, and only the title data with a link to the updated version will remain.

At your request, we can immediately delete the full-text of your title stored on EconStor from the server. For documentation reasons, the title data will be preserved. If you wish to withdraw a document from EconStor, please send us an email at econstor@zbw-workspace.eu.

Send an email with your contact information and details of your academic institution to: econstor@zbw-workspace.eu. We prefer that you use an email address registered to your academic institution.

After the EconStor team has verified your request, we will send you a link to the registration form. Please enter your first and last name and a password (consisting of at least six characters). Please keep the password in a safe place. After you have registered with us, you can sign in with your email address and your password and submit documents via self-upload.

EconStor has signed usage agreements with numerous institutions which publish working and discussion paper series or journals. Based on these agreements, titles from series and journals are continuously entered into EconStor.
All documents will remain permanently on EconStor, unless the author(s) or the editor(s) request withdrawal. The digital preservation of the documents is ensured through a long-term preservation archive maintained in cooperation with the German TIB (Hanover) and ZBMED (Cologne/Bonn).
The EconStor services are offered free of charge, as the ZBW is financed as a public information infrastructure.
Yes. When you submit documents to EconStor, you grant only a non-exclusive usage right to the ZBW, the operator of the publication server. Thus, you retain the right to publish the document elsewhere. If you wish to publish in a journal that requires exclusive usage rights, you may only upload your publication on EconStor with the consent of the publishing house. Many publishers allow the publication of an article’s preprint version. Please check your author contract if you have one and (alternatively) in the SHERPA/RoMEO database, which lists numerous standard conditions of publishers for the parallel publication in Open Access. Should the publisher not allow authors to self-archive a preprint, you have the option to withdraw your article from EconStor.
If you wish to submit texts to EconStor that have previously been published elsewhere, e.g. articles in journals, you should first check whether you have granted exclusive usage rights to the primary publisher, usually a publishing house. In this case, you can only submit your publication to EconStor with the permission of the primary publisher. Many publishers allow the author's version of an article to be submitted. Please check your author contract if you have one and (alternatively) in the SHERPA/RoMEO database, which lists numerous standard conditions of publishers for the parallel publication in Open Access.
Although we have no direct impact on the listing of publications in Google Scholar, our experience shows that EconStor publications appear in the Google Scholar index at the latest 7 days after their release.
The document will be verified by the EconStor team and made available within a few days after submission.
Papers can only be submitted as PDF files.
The EconStor self-upload is intended primarily for submitting previously published and/or peer-reviewed texts as pre- or postprints (authors' versions, final drafts) or original versions (publishers' versions). You can publish other types of documents on EconStor (working and discussion papers and other preprints, qualifying theses, conference proceedings, research reports, expert opinions, reviews) as long as they are not contained in series which publishers provide fully and continuously on EconStor.
You must ensure that publishing the document and making it publicly available on EconStor does not infringe the rights of third parties (e.g. copyright, trademark, personality or other rights of third-parties such as co-authors, publishers, copyright collecting agencies and providers of third-party funds). You must also ensure that you have not made any dispositions that countermand the transfer of rights granted with this agreement. In cases of multiple authorship, you must ensure that all co-authors are aware of the submission of the work and that they give their unconditional agreement.

You can submit to EconStor previously published scholarly publications and unpublished texts from Economics and Business studies, as well as from neighbouring and ancillary disciplines if they have a focus on economics. Generally, only publications in English or German can be accepted. The following types of documents can be accepted on EconStor:

  • Article
  • Book Part
  • Working Paper / Preprint
  • Conference Paper
  • Doctoral Thesis
  • Book
  • Research Report
  • Proceedings
  • Book Review
  • Contribution to Periodical

Abstracts of articles or books and presentation slides will not be accepted, nor will students’ term papers. The EconStor editing team reserves the right to refuse submitted documents, i.e. there is no entitlement to have submitted documents published.

Submitting authors must be employees of an academic institution (inside or outside a university). Furnishing an e-mail address for registration that can be attributed to such an institution is considered sufficient proof.
For copyright reasons, the ZBW – as operator of EconStor – needs a simple usage right to make your document available on EconStor. By signing the Deposit Licence, such usage rights are granted and the conditions set for making your document accessible on EconStor. The Deposit Licence is embedded in the self-upload process and will be signed during submission. You can find the full text of the Deposit Licence here.

Searching EconStor

You can use the search search on EconStor to browse for the publications of individual authors. For complex searches, we recommend our portal EconBiz, where you can search many other economic databases besides EconStor.
On EconStor you can find publications and preprints from Economics and Business Studies. The majority of publications are provided by economic research institutes and faculties at universities in Germany and abroad. The provision is based on usage agreements.

Access to EconStor documents

No. Registration is not required to search for and access the full-texts. You only need to register if you want to submit your own documents to EconStor via self-upload.

The RePEc service of EconStor

We continuously harvest your website for newly published documents, but you also have the option to report them to us by email at econstor@zbw-workspace.eu melden.
All series and journals available on EconStor can be included in the RePEc service. If you wish to use the RePEc service, please send us an email at econstor@zbw-workspace.eu. The RePEc service is currently available only for publications from Austria, Germany and Switzerland.
The RePEc service is free of charge for you, as are all other EconStor services.