Benefits of Publishing in Repositories

Benefits of publishing in repositories are in particular:

• As a rule, authors transfer only simple usage rights to repositories when publishing, which still enables the dissemination of their work on other publication platforms (unless they granted previously third parties an exclusive right of use).
• Good visibility of publications by using persistent identifiers, metadata standards and transfer of data to so-called harvesters. This improves the findability via search engines or library catalogues.
• Download counts and other metrics give authors insight into how their works are being used.
• Provision of bibliographic data that can be imported into literature management programs and thus reused in other contexts.
• Open access requirements of most funders can be easily met with the help of repositories.

In addition, publishing exclusively in a publication venue also does not guarantee the long-term availability of scholarly content. Publishers in their role as commercial service providers are primarily interested in the economic exploitation of publications. Autonomy from commercial interests is extremely important for a sustainable scholarly publishing system, so that scholarly output remains findable, citable and traceable in the long term. Parallel publication in a repository is therefore highly recommended. Not all journals or publishers will be able and/or willing to shift to an open access model, which is why repositories will continue to be an essential part of the publishing landscape in the future.