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KIT Scientific Publishing focuses on electronic publications. We also offer the production of printed books. KIT Scientific Publishing has four main goals:
- Speed:
Electronic publishing allows information to be spread quickly and makes it directly accessible to users. - Quality control:
KIT Scientific Publishing publishes only scholarly works of high quality written by members of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). The documents are prepared optimally for electronic publication. - Long term availability:
Long term availability of works is guaranteed by archiving the documents in the KIT's text archive. - Free access:
Research results of the University are transferred by the KIT Scientific Publishing to the scholarly community in accordance with Open Access, to help ensure the free access to scholarly information.
With the continuing proliferation of scholarly information, the future rests in electronic publishing and the internet. Online information is characterized by ease of access, at any time and from any place and reusability, and will lead to an improvement in the field of scholarly information and to higher efficiency of scholarly work in research, teaching and study.
KIT Scientific Publishing thereby follows the positions laid out in the paper "Information vernetzen - Wissen aktivieren" of the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research, demanding free access to scholarly information world-wide for everyone at any time and from any place under fair conditions, as well as the promotion of information systems with high-quality service products under the criteria of the global market and efficiency.
Author rights in the age of digital publishing
Many publishing houses require the exclusive rights to the use of the printed and electronic versions of their authors' publications, thus taking away all copyrights from the authors. The internationally active Creative Commons movement counters this practice, with its goal of allowing scholars themselves to determine the copyrights of their publications. Founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessig, it provides an international procedure for self licensing, analogous to GPL in the software area.
With a Creative Commons license, the author specifies that his work may be copied and spread by others, provided he is named as the original holder of the copyright therefor. In addition, the author determines the conditions under which others may use his work. Thus the commercial use as well as the treatment and/or modification of the work can be permitted or prohibited. A Creative Commons Logo is integrated in each document referencing the selected license.
KIT Scientific Publishing combines the two concepts of Creative Commons and Open Access by publishing scholarly papers electronically on the Internet. It supports scholarls in the self-determination of their copyrights while simultaneously guaranteeing the authenticity, world-wide access and long-term availability of their works.