Certification and beyond: DINI open access activities in Germany

Local publication servers are common and at the same time highly fragmented in Germany. To bring them to greater success it is necessary to standardize further developments. DINI with its publication "Electronic Publishing in Higher Education" laid a foundation for a widespread introduction of general regulations and standards concerning electronic publishing and archiving of scientific documents in institutional repositories. The DINI-Certificate "Document and Publication Repositories" takes this a step further by clearly describing criteria, that will guarantee repositories to be set up and operated according to national standards and international developments. Repositories fulfilling these criteria may be awarded a certificate, testifying to their quality. The DINI certificate may also help their operators to market the institutional repository as a reliable service to support electronic publishing as well as self- archiving at their institution. In parallel to this quality of service activities DINI started to promote a more widespread practice of open access archiving and publishing in Germany by - translating and distributing the SPARC Open Access brochure, - recommending suitable and precise open access policy statements for universities, - recommending standardized usage statistics, - organizing advocacy events, - supporting local initiatives and university libraries in taking on an active role in collecting scientific material from their researchers and teachers - extending the DINI certificate to allow Universities to provide a reliable and attractive self-archiving component to their scientists