OPEN FAU

• Dissemination
  Your electronic publication is available from all over the world at any time and accessible free of charge. Open Access is therefore recommended by FAU as well the German Research Foundation and the German Rector’s Conference.
• Proof of publication
  Your publication may be found quickly and easily via Internet search.
• Archiving and long-term availability
  Your electronic publication will be permanently saved on OPEN FAU. Furthermore, doctoral and postdoctoral theses are forwarded to the German National Library’s archive server and digitally preserved there.
• Free of charge
  The service is free of charge for you. You can also save on OA option fees for subscription journals via a secondary publication.
• OpenAIRE-Compliance
  Open Access publication is mandatory in all EU projects. Open Access publications linked to an EU project must therefore be indicated in OpenAIRE. You can deposit your work in OpenAIRE automatically by publishing in OPEN FAU. Please enter your EU-Project number (metadata field “Identifiers”) for this.

If you would like to publish a paper, you must register either via Shibboleth (i.e. with the FAU IdM identifier) or an FAU email address (…@fau.de; …@uk-erlangen.de; …@alumni.fau.de). How to obtain a valid email address as an alumni can be found under: https://www.fau.eu/alumni/the-fau-network/benefit-from-the-network/#collapse_3. To access and download already published documents you do not need an FAU account.

It may happen that the Shibboleth-Authentication will not work as expected and the Shibboleth-Login will not work. In this situations we recommend to create an account with the fau-email and a password directly in the Open FAU and use this account.

The author grants the operator of OPEN FAU the following rights:

• the permanent right to store electronically, especially in databases
• the non-exclusive permanent right of use (Section 31 (2) German Copyright Act, UrhG) for the purpose of making the document available to the public in international data networks
• the permanent right to convert the document for the purposes of digital preservation or visualisation while preserving the content (the document as originally archived is preserved)
• the right to amend and/or complete the metadata provided by the author or editor where necessary
• the right to give unlimited access to metadata and to make it usable
• the right to disclose the document and the corresponding metadata to the German National Library as well as other document servers and specialist databases that come into question in terms of subject or region with the same aforementioned rights; for dissertations, see also there.

The author is solely responsible for the content of the published documents. The University Library assumes no liability for the content of the publications provided and linked or embedded external pages. The author assures that the document does not violate legal regulations, official orders or other rights of third parties and undertakes to clarify the copyrights and exploitation rights of third parties or to obtain their consent. If the author becomes aware of the existence or development of legal obstacles, he/she shall inform the University Library immediately.

Copyright remains with the author. The University Library is merely granted non-exclusive right of use.

The operator of OPEN FAU guarantees all original data will be preserved and made available for at least 5 years. Through a cooperation with the German National Library, the data is also made available online for an unlimited period of time (so-called long-term archiving). Digital preservation is dependent on the availability of the format, the viewing software as well as conversion options; the German National Library already performs the digital preservation of doctoral and postdoctoral theses. The final published documents sent to the German national library via the OAI interface may not be amended or deleted.

The following categories of electronic documents are stored on and disseminated through OPEN FAU:

• Current publications as well as copies of already published documents by FAU members with scientific content
• Series of publications from FAU
• Publications and series of publications such as collected editions, congress volumes, research reports, journals (e-journals) or series published by FAU members
• Documents that must be published according to examination regulations
• Final papers by FAU students such as Bachelor’s and Master’s theses, and Thesis for Admission to State Examination (with at least 10 ECTS), if publication is recommended by the supervisors or another member of teaching staff and if they were graded as “sehr gut” (excellent). Proof of this shall be submitted by the author.

Documents that have not undergone one of FAU’s internal quality assurance processes, do not meet the requirements for final papers and theses given above and have not been reviewed by the Academic Advisory Board (see Regulations for the Scientific Advisory Board (german)) may only be stored if they have undergone a recognised academic quality assurance process (e.g. peer review) or are addenda (research data, videos, images, etc.) to or predecessors (preprint, working paper, etc.) of documents that have undergone such processes.

Your publication should be submitted as an archivable PDF/A file. Please pay attention to possible display errors or shifted wraps after PDF/A conversion. In order to allow for digital preservation, the files may not be password- or copy-protected. There is a maximum size limit of 150 MB. Please use the FAU IT-Services for Research Data or dedicated data repositories as FAU Community by Zenodo for larger attachments and data for your publications.

Details

• OPEN FAU currently supports e.g. the following file formats: PDF, DOC(X), XLS(X), ZIP, AVI, MP3 and MP4.
• The size of the file should be as small as possible. The system only accepts uploads of files of up to 60 MB size. If your file cannot be reduced in size, please contact the OPEN FAU team.
• For the file name, we recommend a simple title without spaces or special characters such as underscores. Example: Diss.pdf
• The document may not be copy protected or have other restricted access settings. This is a requirement by the German National Library in order to ensure digital preservation is possible. Moreover, no provision is made for restricting access to the documents through OPEN FAU itself, for example to certain IP ranges.
• If your work contains programmes, files, video sequences, audio documents or similar on a DVD-ROM enclosure, they must be prepared for publication as a compressed zip file and uploaded as well.
• In case of any technical difficulties in uploading your documents, please fill out the rest of the form as far as possible and send your files via e-mail to ub-repo(at)fau.de.

All information on dissertations can be found at your doctoral office and for library-based dissertation publications at the University Library’s Dissertation Office page: https://ub.fau.de/forschen/dissertationenstellen

In order to get a better experience with OPEN FAU, we recommend you to use Edge or Chrome and a laptop or PC. Firefox and small mobile devices like tablets or mobile phone may display incorrect the website and may cause unexpected problems.

Before publishing, please clarify whether a blocking notice (delayed publication of your dissertation for at least one year) may need to be applied for. Once your dissertation has been published, it cannot be subsequently embargoed.

• Log in to DSpace and go to “My publications.”
• Drag your dissertation file into the designated area or upload the file.
  Please double check your file before uploading according to the following criteria:
  • Are my title pages designed according to the specifications of the latest RPromO?
  • Are the date of the oral examination and reviewer(s) noted?
  • Are all personal data removed that I do not want to publish? For example, place of birth on the title page, private thanks, dedications and especially your curriculum vitae.
  • Is the file in PDF/A standard?
  • Are all images still displayed correctly after conversion to PDF/A?
• Select your faculty.
• For Document type, select: Dissertation.
• Fill out the upload form
  • Special characters can be used only in abstract, comment and bibliographical reference fields (details under: Markdown, MathJax).
• Regarding the license, please refer to the FAQ item “Which license should I choose?”
• Read the legal notice and agree by checking the appropriate checkbox.
• Submit the work.

In addition, we need the form “Druckfreigabe” from your supervisor. You can find the form “Druckfreigabe” in the downloads of your DocDaten or you can get it directly from your supervisor. Please send us the approved print release to ub-disspflicht@fau.de.

For doctoral candidates at the School of Business, Economics and Society (Fachbereich Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften), the “Druckfreigabe” does not exist and is substituted by the “Vollzugsantrag” which should be sent to ub-wszb-diss@fau.de.

After submission, you will receive feedback from us via email, usually no later than the next business day, if any changes are needed or if any documents are missing. If everything is in order, we will send a submission confirmation by email to the appropriate promotion office, with a copy to you.

What do you need to consider in terms of content?

The title page and the second page (and the cover page if applicable) must comply with the rules set forth in the appendix of the General Doctoral Regulations, for further instructions see also: https://www.ub.fau.de/forschen/dissertationenstellen/#collapse_2. Please also observe the further specifications in the General Doctoral Regulations and FAU’s guidelines for safeguarding good academic practice.

The provisions of the General Doctoral Regulations notwithstanding, the author’s CV does not need to be published. Since the thesis will be permanently accessible to the global public, this may be waived for privacy reasons. Please remove the CV from your publications before publishing in these cases. The CV cannot be deleted later on. The same applies to other sensitive personal data, such as the name of the birthplace on the title page of the dissertation as well as any signatures (either your own or that of any co-authors of included papers). Please omit these personal information like the birthplace in the version to be published. However, the thesis must still be marked as coming from FAU.

ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (PQDT)

With ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (PQDT), our University Library contract with ProQuest provides indexing & abstracting in a renowned subject database, and a print distribution service for all OPEN FAU dissertation publications available in digital-only format. FAU doctoral students are eligible for a royalty from these based on sales and use of their dissertation, provided they contact disspub@proquest.com and set up an account. Royalty rates are currently set at 10% of net income.

Since the General Doctoral Regulations of FAU don’t stipulate the transfer of your thesis to ProQuest as a mandatory part of the publishing requirement, it is also possible to have the dissertation removed from PQDT. In such cases, please inform disspub@proquest.com and CC the library’s repository team at: ub-repo@fau.de. Please use the following template for your removal request email: “As the author of the following thesis, I hereby request the removal of said thesis from ProQuest’s service PQDT: [Thesis Title]. Please see the relevant information regarding the approval of removal requests on my University Library’s online repository: https://ub.fau.de/en/frequently-asked-questions/open-fau/#collapse_36317 ”

As an additional benefit, ProQuest makes archival quality print copies available to you to purchase at a discounted price. Order your copy at https://dissexpress.proquest.com/search.html by searching for it (note, there may be some delay between OPEN FAU publication and indexing in PQDT). Verify that you are the author before check-out to receive discounted pricing. FAQ and instructions available at https://support.proquest.com/articledetail?id=kA23r0000007E8zCAE.

Files that have been finally published and submitted to the German National Library via the OAI interface can no longer be modified or deleted. If authors who have voluntarily published their work should desire a correction, they must re-publish the document. This is equivalent to the procedure of a new edition in print publishing. The individual versions can be linked. The metadata entered during upload can be changed at any time by the OPEN FAU team upon request.

Authors can register documents they publish in OPEN FAU for dividends with the registry portal T.O.M from VG WORT https://tom.vgwort.de/portal/index. You will need to register with T.O.M. for this. Please see the website for more information and the terms and conditions for dividends. When you register your document, you will need to provide the URL https://www.fau.de/ as the domain. The direct link to the document will not be accepted by the system. If VG Wort performs a check to confirm your entitlement, deliver the exact path to your document. Payment counters are not supported in OPEN FAU.

By choosing a CC licence during the publication process, you can easily set legally binding conditions regarding the use and further use of your publication. You must hold the appropriate rights for the usage of CC licences, so you have to check if you have transferred exclusive rights e. g. to a publisher. If you need legal advice, you may contact our in-house counsel Petra Heermann during her office hours at +49 (0)9131-85-29394 or send an e-mail to Petra.Heermann@fau.de .

For license selection, you can use the Creative Commons License Chooser (https://creativecommons.org/choose/?lang=en) or the following overview as a guide:

Please note that with regard to non-commercial use, your choice may restrict the visibility of your document, since this provisions affects search engine providers and resource discovery systems. For further information on the individual licences, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/?lang=en

Notes on CC licenses in the context of secondary publications or cumulative dissertations:

Please follow the policies of the publishers or journals. For example, some publishers allow secondary publication or use in cumulative dissertations only under an NC license. You can use Sherpa Romeo (https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo) as a tool for researching publisher self-archiving policies. If, in the case of cumulative dissertations, the publications to be included are not all under the same CC license, please put a note on corresponding deviations from the CC license of the complete work. Problematic (e.g., legally defective) individual contributions can also be omitted from cumulative dissertations in accordance with § 17 para. 4 sentence 2 RPromO, provided that a reference to the publication is made in accordance with sentence 3, e.g., by means of DOI.

Notes on cases where no CC license is allowed:

In certain cases, the use of a CC license is not allowed. Examples of this would be if the self-archiving policy of the publisher excludes CC licenses (e.g. for some Nature subscription journals: “Please note that the accepted manuscript may not be released under a Creative Commons license”) or if you have published with a German publisher and want to secondary publish according to § 38 para. 4 Act on Copyright and Related Rights (Urheberrechtsgesetz – UrhG) although the exclusive rights of use are held by the publisher (para. 4 only grants the right of public access, no other rights that may be additionally included in CC licenses). Please select the document license “The publication contract and German copyright law apply” in cases where you are self-archiving on the basis of § 38 para. 4 UrhG and “The copyright and license rights of the publisher and any open access rights negotiated with it apply” in all other cases where, for example, no CC license is possible due to the publisher’s policies or other publisher-dependent or negotiated legal situations.

This document server is operated on the basis of the DSpace software. DSpace is documented at https://dspace.lyrasis.org.

Please note that in order to ensure proper function of OPEN FAU a reboot will be performed on a regular basis, during which the system will not be available. This reboot is scheduled for 1 a.m.

Should you encounter any errors during the upload process, change the browser to Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge or Opera and see if the error is solved. If the error persists, you can report it under Feedback. Please include your email address to receive feedback. In the comment field, please include the email address, time, website, web browser and operating system so that we can identify and fix the problems or errors as best as possible.

OPEN FAU offers the search (magnifying glass icon or https://open.fau.de/search) to perform complex searches.

By default, a Boolean “AND” search is performed when multiple terms are entered (see Wikipedia entry on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_algebra#Boolean_operations). This will return results that include each of the terms. “OR and NOT searches are also possible. For example, a search for medical NOT care will return results containing medical but not care.

Phrase searches, such as “medical care” (in quotation marks), will return results that contain exactly the term “medical care”.

Time range searches are also possible, for example dc.date.issued:[2007 TO 2022] or dc.date.issued:[2012 TO *].

The latter is a wildcard search. The wildcard character * can be used.

Certain metadata fields can be addressed by their Dublin Core element names. For example, a search for “dc.title:medical” returns results where the dc.title field contains “medical”. A search for “dc.title:medical AND dc.description.abstract:technology” will return results where dc.title contains “medical” and dc.description.abstract contains “technology”.