Open Access

Berndt Dugall

• The enhancing importance of digital documents has effected activities on how to deal with them. One line came from the more general field of "scientific publishing", which was handled in detail by DINI (Deutsche Initiative für Netzwerkinformation). But for this initiative long- time archiving was only one field of many and was not their primary focus. DINI first of all concentrated on the elaboration of effective and standardized methods and tools for publishing and related services on the basis of open access policy via the use of institutional repositories. The second line of projects came from the more general view of maintaining cultural heritage also in a digital world. Especially under the patronage of the Ministry of Education and Research important projects were being financed. Strategic solutions including archives, libraries, and museums are discussed and elaborated within NESTOR, where more technical solutions based on the term of practicability are developed within KOPAL. KOPAL brought together the industry (IBM) with a public- funded technical center (GWDG) and two libraries (DNB and SUB Göttingen). Within this project a general software implementation, which took into consideration all necessary international standards, could be finished last month and has been now for about two weeks. Based on early results within NESTOR it seemed important too, to strengthen all activities by giving them a legal basis. Therefore when the law changed concerning the German National Library from June 22nd this year (DNBG), the library was authorized with all the necessary instruments to collect digital documents in "non-physical" form as well. With this law at the moment Germany is in the rare position of being one of the few countries where the collection of network publications is part of the whole legal deposit strategy.