FAQs en

Usually not. The Research Collection is freely accessible online. A valid ETH Zurich user account is required for adding new publications as well as for editing existing publications. Furthermore, all items that display an "ETHZ users" availability tag can only be accessed by ETH members after they have signed in with their user account.

Please use the contact form or contact the E-Publishing Office at the ETH Library via telephone: +41 44 632 72 22.

All staff and doctoral students of ETH Zurich are entitled to submit their own publications and research data relevant to research and teaching to the Research Collection.

The publication of a Master's thesis, Bachelor's thesis or a student paper in the Reseach Collection requires a declaration of consent from the professor or lead researcher.

See Publication types.

See File formats for archiving research data.

See How to publish.

Yes, that is possible. You can upload as many files as you want with one publication.

The ETH Library allocates ISBN numbers for individual publications by members of ETH Zurich upon request. Please request the ISBN before you submit your publication to the Research Collection, so you can integrate it into your PDF. You can find out how to proceed to obtain an ISBN on the ISBN Allocation page.

Each item in the Research Collection receives a DOI automatically if the following conditions are met:

• You have uploaded a full text or other digital object.
• You have selected either Open access, Embargoed access, or ETHZ users when defining the Access rights.

The DOI is published and registered once the internal review process for your item is completed.

 Yes, that is possible. See Reserving a DOI for instructions on how to proceed.

Yes, that is possible. Please contact us in order to receive a guest account that will enable you to upload the file.

Yes, in principle, provided that you have the co-authors' consent.

Yes, that is possible. Please flag these publications in the Describe step of the submission process by choosing "No" when asked if your work is an ETH Publication.

It is not possible to publish examination papers (theses) from universities other than ETH Zurich via the Research Collection. However, you can submit theses written at other universities as "metadata only" records, provided the thesis is published on an external repository.

Yes, that is possible, provided that you only want to upload bibliographic data. You can upload lists in BibTex or RIS format containing up to 100 publications. Batch import of full texts or other digital objects is not possible due to copyright reasons. See also Batch import metadata.

Yes, that is possible. See Batch import metadata. 

Yes, that is possible. See Batch import metadata.

We link Research Collection items to external publications at publishers' or other websites exclusively via DOIs or other permanent links. Direct links to PDF documents are not recorded because they are usually unstable and not citable. This rule applies since the launch of the Research Collection and is currently applied retrospectively to PDF links imported from the legacy systems. You are welcome to upload PDFs that do not have a citable link at the publisher's website to the Research Collection, providing copyright has been clarified.

It depends on the copyright regulations of the publishing houses in question, which you can garner from your publishing contract or the SHERPA/RoMEO-database. This will also tell you which article version (postprint, preprint or publisher's PDF) you are permitted to publish with the consent of the publishing house and which embargoes you may have to observe.

Most publishing houses do not allow self-archiving of an article in the publisher’s layout. In many cases, however, the publication of preprints or postprints is permitted. Please check the regulations that apply to your publication in your publishing contract or the SHERPA/RoMEO-database.

The SHERPA/RoMEO-database provides a comprehensive listing of publisher guidelines on self-archiving and secondary publication, where you can find out which article version (postprint, preprint or publisher PDF) you are allowed to publish with the consent of the publishing house and which embargoes you may have to observe.

The version of a paper prior to the peer review process is referred to as a preprint or non-peer-reviewed author's manuscript. 

The postprint or Author's Accepted Manuscript (AAM) includes all changes and revisions that result from the peer review process. It is the final author's version of the manuscript accepted by the publishing house for publication. Content-wise, the postprint is identical to the publisher's PDF but does not include the publisher's layout or logo.

 No. In the event of publication via the Research Collection, the copyright remains with the author. This means that no legal obstacles stand in the way of a future publication of your research results elsewhere (such as with a commercial publisher).

Provided the rights of use have not been relinquished, there are no contractual agreements with ETH Zurich or a funding institution regarding usage, your document is not subject to an obligation of secrecy and the rights of third parties are not violated, you can agree to the publication. 

 In the case of co-authorships, the co-authors must consent to the publication. Moreover, it should be contractually secured that the work published via the repository can remain accessible. 

For images that you use for illustration purposes only, you need to obtain the rights from the copyright holder to use and publish them.

For images that you use for the purpose of quotation in a scientific work, according to Swiss copyright law, you don’t need to get individual permissions. Please note that a quotation purpose is only given if the image is used to prove a statement or to illustrate and explain a statement.

Additionally, since images rights of scientific figures are often owned by international publishing houses and Swiss copyright law therefore might not be applicable, we recommend getting the rights to use an image even if it is used in the context of a quotation.

Yes, based on the Copyright Act revised in April 2020, libraries can display copyrighted abstracts in their directories, i.e. also those whose rights are held by a publisher.

Once the file has been uploaded, an automatic confirmation is generated.

You only have to present the confirmation you receive automatically after the upload.

The review and publication process for the full text takes a maximum of two working days. The metadata of your thesis will be visible immediately after upload.

No. The doctoral thesis must be written in a uniform style. Stringing together articles that have already been published in the publishers' layout is not permitted. This applies to the main body of the doctoral thesis as well as to the appendix. However, it is possible to upload an already published article as a separate item in the Research Collection and, if applicable, to publish it Open Access. The articles can then be linked to the doctoral thesis via the field "Related publications and datasets" (example: https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/handle/20.500.11850/387457).

The CV can be omitted in the electronic version of the doctoral thesis. However, it must be included in the print copies to be submitted.

No, once the doctoral thesis has been approved by the Department Conference, it can no longer be changed. The printed version must match the electronic version.

Yes, that is possible in most cases, if you are the author. Please contact us.

It is not mandatory to include the outside cover, but we recommend including it. This way the system will automatically generate a thumbnail displaying this cover on the landing page of the thesis, otherways the thumbnail is generate from the black and white title page.

No. However, according to the Guidelines for Research Data Management at ETH Zurich, you are obliged to publish any data considered relevant for your publications in a FAIR repository. 

Some funding agencies also have specifications for data storage. However, you usually decide yourself which data archive or service best meets your requirements. The index re3data reviews a wide range of data archives.

Yes, the Research Collection complies with all standards and criteria for making data available according the FAIR Data Principles (Findable - Accessible - Interoperable - Reusable).

Yes. The Research Collection is included in the list of repositories that meet the criteria of the SNSF policy on Open Research Data.

Large data sets can lead to difficulties uploading your data and also when data are downloaded. We have no influence on several factors that cause these difficulties (such as browser and internet connection). Uploading data packages up to 15 GB is possible, but downloading packages of this size with a browser is usually not feasible. Therefore, we recommend using files not exceeding a maximal size of 10 GB.

If your archival package exceeds this size, please split it into meaningful subunits and use one ZIP or tar container for each subunit. You will then be able to upload all your container files attached to one Research Collection item. However, each entry should not exceed a total size of 50 GB. 

The libdrive service is available for publishing data volumes over 50 GB. 

More information on this topic can be found on the page Research data.

Research output from cooperation projects can be deposited in the Research Collection independent of where it was produced, as long as an ETH group or institute takes over the responsibility for obtaining the publication rights from the data producers.

Please consider the following when uploading the data:

• Field Organisational Unit: Data that was not produced at ETH must use the organisational unit of the ETH group or institute that was part of the cooperation.
• Field ETH Publication: Data that was not produced at ETH Zurich must be marked with a "No".
• Field Project/Grant: Please choose the ID/name of the cooperation project / grant, in order to prevent unnecessary enquiries from our staff about the origin of the data.

• The ETH Library forwards access request to the rights holder of a dataset - even if he/she is no longer affiliated with ETH Zurich - under the condition that the rights holder has an up-to-date ORCID record and his/her ORCID iD has been assigned to the corresponding author record in the Research Collection.
• According to the Guidelines for Research Data Management at ETH Zurich, Research Group Leaders are responsible for "taking decisions about access rights for unpublished data as well as for group members leaving ETH Zurich". ETH Library therefore forwards access request to datasets where the rights holder does not have an up-to-date ORCID record and/or does respond to requests to their former Research Group Leader.
• In addition, you might want to consider assigning the task of a “data steward” to someone in your group. This person can approve access requests for data (even if the data producer has already left the group) and edit data that has not yet been published. If you would like to determine a data steward for your group, please contact research-collection@library.ethz.ch.

Yes, the Research Collection has been checked by Scientific Data for compliance their policies. When submitting your paper simply choose "DataCite DOI" as the repository name.

Yes, that is possible. Please see Add organisational codes for instructions on how to proceed.

Please see the instructions Confirm organisational codes.

Each head of an organizational unit subject to report via Annual Academic Achievements has permission to confirm organizational units in the Research Collection. They can delegate this permission to other ETH members. The delegation has to be executed in ETHIS. For instructions on how to proceed see Delegieren einer Berechtigung in ETHIS (German only).

For publications to be accepted in the annual report, the publication year and a confirmed organisational code are required. Further information is available on the page Academic report.

Web editors using the content management system AEM can use the Publications component to generate publication lists for individual persons or organisational units. The functionality of the Publications component is described in the AEM Manual (ETH user account required to access this page).

There might be various reasons. To help you find the problem please let us know how exactly your component is configured, e.g. which criteria (author, organisational codes,...) your are filtering for and which publication you miss.