1. Definitions

DepositOnce is TU Berlin's institutional repository. It is hosted by the Service Center Campus Management (ZECM) and operated and continually developed by the University Library.

DepositOnce is a platform on which the research results of TU Berlin members and, if applicable, their academic partners are stored and made freely available on the internet, including:

  • research data, that is analysis and/or data required for the verification and reproduction of research results such as consolidated measurement data, video and audio data, software and scripts for data analysis,
  • publications with academic content such as monographs and collected editions, journal articles and book chapters, conference proceedings and conference papers, research reports,
  • publications that must be made public in connection with examination regulations (doctoral theses and post-doctoral theses),
  • theses of TU Berlin students if the thesis has received the grade "very good" and the publication is endorsed by the supervisor or referee.

The research results uploaded in DepositOnce are hereinafter referred to as digital objects.

2. Legal framework conditions

Any publication at DepositOnce requires that the author transfers to the operator the non-exclusive, irrevocable right to reproduce the publication and make it publicly available. Any printed or electronic publication of the research results – with amendments or in excerpts, if applicable – prior to, or after their publication at DepositOnce remains at the absolute discretion of the author.

The transfer of the non-exclusive right of use entitles the operator of DepositOnce to permanently

  • make available to the public electronic copies of the digital object (upon expiry of the access lock or embargo, if any) and, if needed, to convert it to other formats to enable its display on future computer systems. This permission excludes content-related modifications to the digital object. This right shall apply to all types of use, be they currently known or as yet unknown.
  • notify and transmit digital objects to third parties, for instance, as part of national collection mandates, particularly for the purpose of long-term archiving.
  • transfer agreed rights and obligations to another repository (for instance, any repository succeeding DepositOnce). This also entitles DepositOnce to assign to a third party the right to supply the digital object to the public (for example, through a facility specialized in enabling the long-term availability of such objects).

In order to govern the transfer of the required rights of use from the authors to the operator, the following publication contracts, tailored to either publications or research data, are offered when registering a digital object in DepositOnce:

In addition, authors may transfer certain rights of use to the general public by means of suitable open-content licenses (for instance a Creative Commons license or a free or open software license). For publications, according to its Open Access Policy, TU Berlin recommends the Creative Commons license CC BY.

The sole responsibility for the content of the research data and publications lies with the authors.

Authors are obliged to clarify whether third party rights are affected. (Exception: If checking the legal conditions and requirements for open access self-archiving is provided as a service by the University Library, the University Library also assumes legal responsibility for it.)

In the event that the author learns of any (actual or assumed) infringements of third party rights, they shall notify the operator without delay. The operator reserves the right to block public access to a digital object if there are concrete indications of any infringement of third party rights.

The operator is not liable for any damage resulting from the infringement of copyright and exploitation rights, provided that these infringements are not due to provably wilful misconduct or gross negligence.

3. Submission and indexing

In most cases, digital objects are transmitted by means of the upload form provided by the repository. An access authorization is required for this purpose; a self-registration is possible with a TU e-mail address. The operator supports authors in the publication of their research results.

Metadata is captured by the authors themselves via an upload form. In doing so, the authors attribute, among other things, a class according to the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) as well as keywords in German and English. The metadata is reviewed by the operator and, if necessary, corrected and complemented in consultation with the authors. PDF documents shall meet formal specifications. Research data shall be accompanied by documentation (e.g. instructions or a separate README file) that describes, for example, how the data was created and how it can be used.

The University Library supports TU members in submitting digital objects as part of the self-archiving services, the university library supports TU members in submitting digital objects. This particularly includes journal articles for which open access funding comes from the central TU publication fund, and publications for which special open access rights exist (in particular from alliance and national licenses).

For the formal and content-related indexing of the digital objects, both nationally and internationally defined standards and recommendations are used. The metadata is disseminated in different formats (e.g. the Dublin Core Element Set and the German National Library’s xMetaDissPlus format) in order to make them freely available on the internet.

4. Making data available on the Internet

DepositOnce is committed to the open access concept and for TU Berlin, it is one of the tools for implementing open access goals in line with the TU Berlin's Open Access Policy, the Research Data Policy of the TU Berlin, the international Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities and the Open Access Strategy for Berlin.

  • The metadata of digital objects stored on DepositOnce is freely available on the internet and may be obtained, saved and made available to third parties – in expanded form or in excerpts, if applicable – via open interfaces. The metadata is subject to the CC0 license.
  • Likewise, the digital objects are normally freely accessible after publication. In justified cases, it is possible to temporarily restrict public access to the digital object (embargo). During the embargo, only the metadata, but not the digital objects themselves, is made accessible to the public. In the period of the embargo, the authors, at their own discretion, may grant access to the digital objects to third parties upon request. Upon expiry of the embargo, the digital object is automatically unlocked, thus becoming freely accessible on the internet.
  • The digital objects are assigned citable persistent identifiers in the form of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), which are registered and administered at DataCite.

Digital objects cannot be changed after publication. DepositOnce provides a versioning feature to document new findings.

Once published, digital objects will not be deleted. In the event of a compelling legal reason, public access to the digital object may be restricted. However, the digital objects will remain in the repository.

Digital objects are indexed by local, regional and transregional library catalogues and search engines as well as via the DataCite Metadata Store, OpenAIRE and the academic search engine BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine). To increase the visibility of its service, DepositOnce is registered with various international open access registries, e.g. ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories), the OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) and the re3Data (Registry of Research Data Repositories). To ensure that the open access versions in DepositOnce are correctly identified by established open access discovery services (Unpaywall, Open Access Button, CORE), the operator checks and supplements the publication metadata submitted by the authors in the upload form.

As a registered OAI Data Provider, DepositOnce meets the requirements of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting in order to make the metadata suitable for harvesting and further processing, and it makes the metadata freely accessible on the internet via the OAI-PMH interface.

5. Long-term storage and archiving

Digital objects are stored for the long term, that is, in accordance with the recommendations of the German Research Foundation, for at least ten years (see TU Berlin's Open Access Policy, the Research Data Policy of the TU Berlin and the Guidelines on the Safeguarding of Good Academic Practice at TU Berlin).

Authors are asked to submit their digital objects in an unencrypted manner, and in a format that is non-proprietary and suitable for long-term archiving. As a rule, digital objects must not have any password protection or be subject to other measures of digital rights management. PDF files are requested to be submitted in the PDF/A format (see instructions for creating PDF/A-compliant files).

In cooperation with a suitable facility specialized in long-term archiving, the operator aims to digitally preserve the research data stored in DepositOnce. The digital preservation of publications is ensured through the long-term archiving system of the German National Library.

The operator will make every adequate effort to ensure the long-term storage of the digital objects. The operator cannot be held liable for any damage to, or loss of, a digital object or other related data.

6. Technical framework

DepositOnce is operated using the open source software DSpace. The technical infrastructure is hosted by Service Center Campus Management (ZECM) and is maintained and further developed by the TU University Library. The servers and data involved are backed up decentrally on a daily basis.

Accesses to this service are stored in the log files of the web server for ten days and then deleted. No data is passed on to third parties. DepositOnce does not use any techniques that aim to evaluate the access behavior of individual users.

7. Responsibilities and contact persons

The following departments of the University Library are in charge of the DepositOnce support: The Main Department 3 – Electronic Services is responsible for the technical operation, the Main Department 4 – Publication Services is responsible for repository management and content management.

Contact:
Technische Universität Berlin – University Library
Fasanenstr. 88, 10623 Berlin, Germany
  • General questions:
Email: depositonce@ub.tu-berlin.de
  • Research data:
Tel.: +49 30 314 76091
Email: szf@ub.tu-berlin.de
  • Publications:
Tel.: +49 30 314 76130
Email: openaccess@ub.tu-berlin.de