Guidelines of MACAU

1. General description of the service and what it offers

MACAU is a service for electronic publication of predominantly scientific works with a personal, institutional or thematic relation to Kiel University (CAU).

MACAU is technically and organisationally operated by Kiel University Library (UB Kiel) and is available free of charge. The UB Kiel aims to permanently save works added to MACAU, to preserve their content and form, as well as to make them visible worldwide, any time and any place, freely accessible and to the greatest extent freely usable (open access) online and via common reference tools (search engines, library catalogues, etc.).

This requires the careful indexing of works according to current standards, the use of clear identification methods and the transparent disclosure of copyright and licensing conditions of the works placed on the system. The service, its interfaces and the software used are oriented towards specialist recommendations and guidelines of (inter) national projects and initiatives for operating institutional publication servers (such as DINI, OpenAIRE).

2. Spectrum and criteria for use

MACAU is a service for permanently making works publicly available, which

  1. have been produced by or with the involvement of members of the CAU,
  2. have been produced by or with the involvement of scientists at closely affiliated academic establishments,
  3. have a thematic reference to the CAU and its institutions.

The uploaded works must satisfy the general and discipline-specific principles of scientific work.

The works may be first or second publications, e.g. for the purpose of self-archiving papers which have already been published elsewhere. The uploaded works should present an, if possible, closed contribution to scientific communication. In terms of operating MACAU and the goal of sustainable provision, common platform-independent and open standard formats are preferred. In addition, files saved on the server must not be password protected or restricted in any other way such as with measures for digital rights management.

The users usually put their works on MACAU themselves, including their indexing and description data (metadata) plus abstract. This does not lead to any right to publication. Before the actual publication, all works undergo a formal review process. The UB Kiel reserves the right to reject the publication of any works which do not meet the necessary legal, technical/formal or content requirements. In addition, before publication, a written contract (see 3.3) is to be concluded with the service operator in which the authors grant the UB Kiel the necessary usage rights, among other things.

2.1. Research data

Research data generated in the context of scientific work cannot be published on MACAU. For publication, it is recommended to use a subject- or material-specific repository or the institutional data repository of the CAU (opendata@uni-kiel) according to the disciplinary practice. The team of the central research data management of the CAU is available for questions regarding the handling of research data. Published research data can subsequently be linked to publications on MACAU using a Digital Object Identifier (DOI).

2.2. Supplementary material

Supplementary material (Addendum / Appendix) can be published for the main publications on MACAU if required, as long as it is not part of the publication PDF anyway. It must be in PDF format, structured in terms of content and provided with title and author information. Supplementary material also receives a license and is described with metadata (abstracts, keywords).

2.3. Final theses (e.g. Magister or Bachelor thesis

Regularly, no theses are published on MACAU at the moment.

2.4. Full-text searchable documents

All documents submitted to MACAU must be searchable to realize their full potential in visibility and usability, and to ensure long-term archivability. Accordingly, only 'born-digital' documents are regularly accepted. Scanned, photographed, or otherwise digitized documents will not be accepted. Textual content must not be integrated throughout the document as graphics.

3. Legal framework

3.1. First publications

The authors assure the service operator that the work they put on MACAU does not infringe any third part rights. Users are obliged to gain consent to publish if any external materials are used (such as pictures) and there are potential co-authors or others involved (e.g. publishers, assessors, examiners). The contractual cover (see 3.3.) can, however, be representatively submitted by the users for all legally involved participants.

3.2. Second publications

In addition to the obligations described in 3.1., the other existing contractual agreements (incl. licensing conditions) must be observed for second publications. Users must potentially declare authorisation for the service operator in advance for second publications (e.g. via written permission from the first publisher, the first publishing journal or similar).

3.3. General information

The authors are obliged to conclude a written publication agreement with the service operator in advance. In this agreement, they grant (among other things) the simple usage rights for electronically storing the work and making it publicly accessible, including the indexing and description data (metadata) plus abstract. In addition, the authors also consent to the work being passed on to third parties for the purpose of long-term archiving and electronic copyright deposit. In terms of long-term backups and provision of the works, the authors also entitle the service operator to produce copies of the works, if necessary, or undertake any required data migration (e.g. converting the original format into other electronic formats). Apart from these points, the UB Kiel leaves the authors all rights for free further use of their works.

In general, MACAU enables immediate, full access to the uploaded works. However, with dissertations there is the option to put an embargo on the publication for copyright or patenting reasons. This must be specified by the users and confirmed in the publication agreement. Until the end of the embargo period, MACAU will only provide the metadata, abstract and a summary of the publication.

The use of all works on MACAU is subject to the provisions of the German Copyright Act (UrhG), potentially extended via specially designated licenses (see 6). Metadata is made available under the CC0 1.0 license.

4. Saving and availability of uploaded works

MACAU is designed for long-term archiving. This means that it guarantees that all uploaded documents are kept available for at least five years. The aim, however, is to permanently guarantee storage within the scope of the specific, format-related capabilities.

The following measures support the sustainable, stable operation of MACAU and saving works:

  1. MACAU is included in the University Computing Centre’s backup concept.
  2. The UB Kiel transfers all works saved in MACAU to the German National Library (DNB). This ensures additional permanent archiving.
  3. The service operator makes every effort to meet the requirements of external institutions for digital archiving, as well as to prove this via audits and obtaining corresponding certificates.

The service uses tried and tested instruments to reference the uploaded works in the long-term which a) ensure direct online access to the respective resources and b) their citation. The following are used for persistent identification of documents:

  • Uniform Resource Name (URN): is automatically assigned when the work is put on MACAU
  • Digital Object Identifier (DOI): is assigned by MACAU – if not already available
  • International Standard Book Number (ISBN): is adopted – if available
  • International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): is adopted – if available

In addition, the following instruments may be used to identify authors, publishers or other people who might have been involved in the works:

  • Identifiers from the Open Researcher Contributor Identification Initiativ (ORCID iD): must be registered by the users themselves
  • The CAU’s research information system (FIS) that is connected to MACAU: CAU scientists are automatically stored in FIS, other members of the CAU need to be registered manually by the FIS team

For citation and archiving reasons (authenticity), no changes can be made to the works after they have been published on MACAU. In agreement with the service operator, the author or publisher can, however, subsequently add comments to the work at the metadata level or to the abstract, provided these are important for its allocation in the scientific context. These comments include, for example, information about revised new editions or errors. New versions of works can also be uploaded to MACAU, on the other hand. They then count as new publications and must be newly recorded/created.

Removing published works from being publicly visible and used on MACAU at a later date can only be done for copyright or examination legislation reasons, and upon written request to the UB Kiel. In cases of academic qualification papers, this always occurs with the involvement of the respective institution responsible for examination legislation (e.g. the Doctoral Degree Committee). The following points must be observed during this process:

  1. the originally published file of the work is maintained in a condition that is not publicly accessible for archiving purposes
  2. the metadata set of the work remains publicly visible on MACAU and is marked with an annotation on removing the work from the public eye and its usability
  3. the UB Kiel makes an application to the DNB that free access to the work there is no longer possible
  4. the work may already have been downloaded and passed on multiple times because it has previously been made publicly available using international data networks.

5. Technical operation and instruments for implementation

MACAU is based on the open source repository framework MyCoRe.

The repository has an OAI-PMH interface, across which the metadata recorded in MACAU is provided, and a DOI-based mechanism for retrieving and importing bibliographic metadata. On top of this, the service provides the licensing conditions for uploaded works in a format that can be read by people and by machines, and uses MD5 checksums to secure its integrity.

6. Declaration for open access

The CAU supports and promotes open accessibility to the results of scientific research and to the sources of cultural heritage (see the Guidelines on promoting Open Access at Kiel University). As a platform for electronically publishing scientific works, MACAU is the central infrastructural-organisational instrument for publishing using open access at the CAU.

In addition to the aspect of free accessibility, the UB Kiel is committed to a preferably free licensing of scientific works which are published using MACAU - with the goal of their further distribution and subsequent use. The service makes the globally-recognised standard licensing agreements of the charitable organisation Creative Commons available for this purpose.

In the sense of open access, MACAU and its contents are documented, for example, on the following online directories:

  • BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine)
  • CORE
  • Crossref
  • DINI (Deutsche Initiative für Netzwerkinformation)
  • OAI (Open Archives Initiative)
  • OpenAIRE (Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe)
  • OpenDOAR (Open Directory of Open Access Repositories)
  • ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories)
  • Unpaywall

You can find more information about publishing in open access from our information brochure, the Open-Access-Infopoint Schleswig-Holstein or on the pages of the UB Kiel.