National Hosting of Electronic Resources (NatHosting)

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A reliable and sustainable access to scientific publications is a key requirement for research. Publications are normally accessed by retrieving a digital copy directly from the publisher’s or content provider’s homepages. This access can be disrupted due to several reasons such as a temporary failure of the publisher’s infrastructure, ceased operation of the publisher or simply cancellation of the subscription by the library. The project “National Hosting of Electronic Resources” develops a concept to ensure access to publications in these cases.

National Hosting of electronic Resources

Sustainable and failure-free access to digital publications is crucial for science and research. The DFG-funded project National Hosting of Electronic Resources (NatHosting) aims at developing a nationwide strategy for avoiding interruptions resulting from failures of publisher’s servers, transfer of journals, or the cancellation of electronic resources. The project takes licensing, organizational, financial, as well as content-specific issues into account. Starting with an evaluation of the systems, a technical concept is designed that serves as a basis for constructing the required rights management system, the workflows, and best-practices for organization and financing models.

The envisioned architecture and the access management system is required to be integrated into the existing library infrastructure. This includes authenticating end users as well as providing access through search engines and library catalogues. In order to decide whether a user is allowed to access a resource, access rights information is required. This information shall be managed in cooperation with the ERM project and shall be accessible through interfaces. In this project, a system prototype will be implemented.

This project is carried out in close cooperation with the KIT Library