Austria

There are at least 16 universities in Austria. There are 3 institutions that maintain a digital repository for research output: the University of Vienna, the Economic University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Legislation is pending about mandatory depositing of publications at the Austrian National Library. In 2006, the National Library installed a Digitool-Repository system from Exlibris.

The Austrian Academy of Sciences has signed a contract with the National Library about long term preservation of their repository contents. Their repository is operated by the Austrian Academy of Sciences Press. This means that they cover 15% of output of the 1100 staff at the Academy. All publications are available free within the Academy's network which includes a significant part of Austrian scholars. There are also two Open Access journals, one free database and free basic information about two other databases. They have been members of Crossref since 2003 and assign DOIs to their records. Via Crossref, their metadata is indexed by Scirus (Elsevier) and Microsoft Live Academic. Recently they have signed a contract with Google scholar. Finally, aside from collecting and storing articles and ebooks in their repository, they have developed the repository as a scholraly workbench for creating encyclopedias, dictionaries and other database-like scientific publications and offer publication services to academic institutes.

The Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (FWF) research funding body (Fund for the Promotion of Scientific Research) strongly encourages deposit of materials to Open Access. It has submitted a statement to the European Research Council (ERC) encouraging the ERC to formulate standards, create an infrastructure and set incentives for a Europe wide solution for Open access in Science and the Humanities.

The DRIVER wiki may be a useful source of further information.

Are there developments in this country that you would like to inform the DRIVER community about? If so, please visit the DRIVER wiki. There you will find guest editors' contributions to the countries pages. Information about the easy process of editing pages and how to obtain a password can be found on the wiki under "PmWiki Software". We look forward to your visit.

Last updated: 14-Nov-2008