Publishing papers on EconStor – THE Open Access Repository for economics

EconStor is the ZBW’s repository which offers research literature in Open Access and makes it findable through various portals and search engines.

Practical guide

What is EconStor?

EconStor is an Open Access repository for scholarly literature in economics. It is operated by the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics as a non-commercial public service. The full-texts (mostly working papers, but also journal articles and conference proceedings) collected are all freely and permanently accessible according to the principles of Open Access.

URL: www.econstor.eu

Wo can publish on EconStor?

Economic research institutions which publish their own series and/or journals (e-journals) can make these publications fully available on EconStor. For existing series and journals EconStor offers a “full service”, i.e. the EconStor team handles the entire process from recording title data and additional metadata like abstracts, keywords and JEL codes (if available in the document) to the final batch-importing of PDF files.

Back issues of your series and journals can also be deposited in EconStor. New issues are imported into EconStor as soon as they are published on your website or as soon as you provide them to us by other means.

The service includes the transfer of title data into international databases and portals:

Can I publish a paper independently of an institution if I am the author?

If you are an individual researcher at a university, and also if you are retired, you can use the self-upload to provide published and/or reviewed documents as postprints (author versions, final drafts) or as original versions (publishers’ versions).

You can submit the following types of publications via self-upload in EconStor:

Article
Book Part
Working Paper/Preprint
Conference Paper
Doctoral Thesis
Book
Research Report
Proceedings
Book Review

After you have signed in (with login and password) you enter your personal area on EconStor (“my EconStor”) where you can submit your papers. You can upload your documents (PDF only) via an online form in five easy steps:

Select a collection that corresponds to your type of publication.
Enter descriptive bibliographic data for your publication.
Upload the electronic full-text to EconStor.
Verify the bibliographic data and the uploaded document.
Sign a licence agreement.

After you have submitted your publication, the team at EconStor will check the information you provide and supplement it if necessary. After this, your document will be released and thus be accessible in Open Access. You will receive confirmation by email, which will also contain the persistent citable link to your publication. All publications submitted through self-upload can be found in the collections of EconStor Direct.

In which languages can I publish?

EconStor only accepts papers with scholarly content from economics in German or English.

How much does it cost to publish on EconStor?

EconStor demands no fees for hosting and disseminating your publication.

Can I track if my publication is read?

EconStor offers various usage statistics, e.g.

Overall statistics of all downloads from EconStor
On the overall statistics page aggregated download numbers are provided for all documents on EconStor in a selected time span (data available since October 2012), a TOP 10 ranking list of most downloaded documents, the distribution of downloads over the selected time span and the countries of origin where the downloads have occurred.

Access via single title view
Every EconStor document offers a link to “Counter Statistics” in the single title view which leads to detailed usage statistics for this document. These usage statistics show in the selected time span (data available since October 2012) the total number of downloads of each PDF document, the temporal distribution as well as the countries of origin where the downloads have occurred.

Why does it make sense to publish my paper on EconStor?

EconStor helps you make your publications more visible and disseminate them more effectively. Dissemination in databases and portals such as RePEc or Google Scholar also gives you international visibility.

Who else publishes on EconStor?

More than 500 research institutions worldwide use EconStor to disseminate their publications. Among the customers are all German economic research institutes and many economics faculties at universities, but also the London School of Economics (LSE), the University of Oxford, Yale, NBER, ETH Zürich. All in all more than 130,000 authors are represented on EconStor with their works.

www.econstor.eu/participants

How many full-texts are stored on EconStor?

In summer 2020, EconStor passed the mark of 200,000. More and more Open Access monographs from economics are available, too, which renowned publishers have put under a CC licence. All in all, there are almost 2,000 freely accessible books from nearly 50 publishers!

Can I use EconStor as a search engine?

You can browse EconStor by author, institution, collection, document type, year of publication, journal, and publisher’s monograph.

What would impress me most?

Our statistics! Global use of EconStor is heavy. The number of downloaded documents grew from 4 million in 2018 to more than 9 million in 2020. More than 75 per cent of all downloads were made from foreign countries. As of June, the number of downloads this year has reached 7,309,538.

Date: July 2021
Questions, comments and notes are welcome at econstor-publish@zbw.eu

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