Open Access Repository EconStor now with more than 200,000 full-texts

Germany’s largest repository for economics literature gives access to publications from all over the world – collaboration with publishers becomes increasingly important
Kiel/Hamburg, 18 August 2020: EconStor (www.econstor.eu) is Germany’s most important Open Access repository for economics literature. It is operated by the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (www.zbw.eu). Within the recent years EconStor has assembled more than 200,000 freely accessible scholarly publications. Content from commercial publishers have an ever larger share in this growth beside the traditional publishing partners from economics research institutions.
This year, EconStor has reached a remarkable size with now more than 200,000 publications. In comparison: five years ago the collection contained 100,000 full-texts. Researchers from all over the world value the EconStor service in three respects:

1. EconStor as an information source – in 2019 alone EconStor counted more than 6.7 million downloads of digital full texts.
2. EconStor as a publication archive – research institutions as well as individual researchers can archive their publications long-term, safely and citably without extra costs Almost 600 institutional partners and more than 1,000 individual authors currently use EconStor to disseminate their publications.
3. EconStor as a distributor in highly frequented international databases and search engines – EconStor has been among RePEc’s ten most important full-text archives worldwide for several years now.

Olaf Siegert, head of Publishing Services at the ZBW, states: “We are happy that so many universities, research institutions and individual authors use our service to disseminate their publications, not only in Germany but also worldwide. EconStor also plays an ever larger role for publications from agreements with publishers. The Open Access transformation, strongly driven by initiatives such as OA2020, DEAL and Plan S, will further amplify this trend.”

The World Bank starts its own Open Access repository

More than 2,000 books, articles, reports and research papers available

The World Bank last week launched its Open Knowledge Repository, which is a one-stop-shop for most of the Bank’s research outputs and knowledge products, providing free and unrestricted access. Additional material, including foreign language editions and links to datasets, will be added in the coming year.

The repository uses a dissemation strategy similar to Econstor, which means that their publications are also visible in

“major international repositories (and databases) such as RePEc (Research Papers in Economics), SSRN and Economists Online. This means that the World Bank publishes just once in its own Open Knowledge Repository while its research is also “harvested” and made openly available through many other searchable online repositories, increasing the number of people able to find World Bank content.”

On top of that, the World Bank also tries to negotiate an Open Access friendly environment for future publications of their researchers:

“The Bank is working with journal publishers to determine fair embargo periods after which peer-reviewed journal articles, as accepted for publication, will be added to the repository. The working paper versions of journal articles are available in the Open Knowledge Repository under a Creative Commons attribution-only (CC BY) license without any embargo period.

World Bank Publisher Carlos Rossel expects embargo periods on journal articles to shorten as more organizations opt for open access and the academic publishing industry adapts to the Internet age. “The changes have been tremendous already, but I think there is a groundswell that is saying that frankly part of the value added by journal publishers can be accomplished through other means, and really what’s most important is for our knowledge to be readily accessible,” he said.”

Read  the full press release here