Germany is at it, too

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This just in -- at least to my INBOX -- Germany is working on a unified repository as well. Called the eSciDoc project, it closely mirrors what the DRC is going to be:

The aim of the Max-Planck Society’s sInfo program is to significantly improve the effectiveness of its
scientists and institutes by systematically exploiting the new technical opportunities (Internet,
digitalization, communication, open access). It addresses many facets of scientific work: information
retrieval, processing and evaluating information, distributing and storing information, scientific work in
the laboratory and at the desk, scientific work performed by individuals and in groups.

The eSciDoc Project which is sponsored by BMBF [Federal Ministry of Education and Research], is an important component of sInfo and will
establish a sustainable infrastructure for scientific information, communication and the distribution of
research results via Open Access, using the concrete example of the Max-Planck Society. The
components developed will be offered to interested communities as reusable solutions in order to put
them in a position to also contribute components for the emerging global knowledge network and
develop further community-specific services on the basis of the infrastructure.

The strategic partnership between MPG and FIZ can ensure the sustainability of the solutions
developed and also guarantee their reusability by other, particularly German institutions. Appropriate
agreements have been reached as part of a collaboration contract. FIZ Karlsruhe is pursuing the aim of
establishing itself as a partner to scientific institutions in setting up and operating information,
publication and communication platforms, and thereby playing a central role in the entire scientific
infrastructure in Germany. The eSciDoc-Projekt is part of a greater strategy for both partners. As a
result, both partners bring considerable resources of their own which will contribute significantly to the
success of the project.

In the first phase of the project – completed by 31.03.2005 – a comprehensive analysis of requirements
was carried out for the area of scientific communication. At the same time, the technical alternatives
were evaluated as part of analyses of the state of the art and research. Both aspects fed into the
detailed definition of the project. A summary of the work carried out and the results of Phase 1 can be
found in Section 2.

In the further phases of the project until the 2nd quarter of 2009, the focus will be on the one hand on
developing a flexible and extensible basic infrastructure which as such will be highly innovative through
its scalability and power, and on the other on implementing programs and processes for realizing four
application scenarios:

• Scholarly Workbench – a web-based work environment for opening up and processing previously
  inaccessible materials for research purposes, to facility work with them and the exchange of
  information on them; Open Access materials will be made available to the entire community.
• Publication Management – an application for the structured registration and management of all the
  publication data of MPIs and the basis for making the research output of the MPS available via Open
  Access. Special emphasis will be placed on the integration of supplementary material as well as
  integration into general and specific Search & Retrieval services. Supporting measures financed by
  the Society’s own resources, are the implementation of an Open Access policy, the definition and
  support of Open Access licenses and a strategy for institutional self-archiving.
• eLib – the local loading of electronic journals and databases to secure long-term availability and
  prepare value added services. Setting up eLib will be financed by the MPS’ own resources.
• eLab Journal – application for documenting experiments which manages analytical results, methods,
  publications, chemical compounds, etc. in an integrated form, and which in its guise as an information
  system, ensures long-term access via comfortable search functions, thereby enabling the
  experiments carried out to be reproduced at a later date.

These services are based on the eSciDoc framework which will be gradually adapted to meet their
needs. They represent central building blocks of the MPS integrated Knowledge Space.

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.mpg.de/english/portal/ to http://www.mpg.de/en on September 26th, 2013.