Technical Information on Open Access at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon
The self-archived copies are stored as an http link to the pdf document in the publications database of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon. The documents can also be accessed via the publications database. To search, tick the field “Full Text in Database”.
This means that the Institutional Repository with the pdf full texts and the publications database with the metadata of all publications at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon are one and the same. The only difference is in the content of the individual fields of the database.
Alongside the “Human Interface” to the Institutional Repository described above, it is also desirable to collect the data of the publications at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon automatically. This process is known as “harvesting”. The Open Archive Initiative has defined the OAI-PMH (Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) for this purpose. It enables the metadata (to which the link to the full text belongs) to be “harvested” by others.
This is done in xml format, whereby the content is structured by Dublin Core. The expression of “Dublin Core” determines which metadata content is stored in which “Dublin Core” element. Agreements on the expression of “Dublin Core” were reached in the HGF Open Access working group.
The publications of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon database was created using the product Filemaker. This product provides a Java servlet processor for processing xslt (extended stylesheets for transformation) files. Thanks to xslt programs developed in-house, the publications database is able to interpret OAI-PMH "Queries" and to return the queried data in conformity with the protocol.