FAQ

For all general inquiries please contact our service desk at @email or 058-765 5700. Contact details, functions and photographs of all Lib4RI team members can be found here. We are also happy to assist you in person at our library locations (please check our opening hours).

Please follow the instructions given here.

Please visit your home library during our opening hours to cancel your Lib4RI / swisscovery account or have your details updated for continuation. If it is inconvenient to visit your home library in person, please contact us via e-mail or phone (058 765 57 00).

There is a number of issues you could encounter. Please try the following solutions:

• Is your computer registered in the network of Eawag, Empa, PSI, or WSL?
• Clear the browser cache and delete cookies from your browser
• Enable cookies and JavaScript in your internet browser
• Check if Lib4RI has a subscription to the database

Please contact us via @email, or call the library at 058 765 5700 if you encounter any problem with the access to databases.

Licensing agreements with electronic service providers restrict access to electronic resources, for which the library Lib4RI pays a subscription fee, to current members of Eawag, Empa, WSL and PSI. However, most licensing agreements permit visitors as so-called “walk-in users” on-site access to our electronic resources on publicly accessible library computers.

Access to licensed electronic resources (such as databases, e-journals or e-books) are governed by the conditions of use contained in license agreements between the library Lib4RI and the respective publishers. These licenses vary but have some common elements.

You are generally not allowed to:

• systematically download from an e-resource, e.g. all articles from one issue of a journal, or an entire e-book. Publishers may monitor use levels of electronic resources and suspend access to this resource in the entire network of the institution if large amounts of information are downloaded in a short time period.
• share downloaded material with unauthorised users, i.e. anyone who is not a member of Eawag, Empa, PSI or WSL.
• use e-resources for commercial gain (i.e. reselling, redistributing or republishing licensed content).

Licensing agreements with electronic service providers restrict access to electronic resources, for which the library Lib4RI pays a subscription fee, to current members of Eawag, Empa, WSL and PSI. However, most licensing agreements permit visitors as so-called “walk-in users” on-site access to our electronic resources on publicly accessible library computers.

You need to be registered with the SLSP network to allow for book loans from Lib4RI and other SLSP libraries via the swisscovery platform. Detailed information is given at Search & Read > Books & e-books and on our information leaflet Lib4RI-Info: Books. For general information regarding Lib4RI and swisscovery please also refer to FAQ – General.

Depending on the location registered with your SLSP account different pickup locations are offered for your swisscovery order. Affiliates of Eawag, Empa, PSI and WSL should select the appropriate option provided in our list of recommended pickup locations in order to avoid delivery charges (invoiced by SLSP).

Should you require books or other documents unavailable via swisscovery please contact our Document Delivery Service for a possible interlibrary loan.

The following checklist should assist you trouble-shooting access issues to electronic books:

Licensing agreements with electronic service providers restrict access to electronic resources, for which the library Lib4RI pays a subscription fee, to current members of Eawag, Empa, WSL and PSI. However, most licensing agreements permit visitors as so-called “walk-in users” on-site access to our electronic resources on publicly accessible library computers.

Access to licensed electronic resources (such as databases, e-journals or e-books) are governed by the conditions of use contained in license agreements between the library Lib4RI and the respective publishers. These licenses vary but have some common elements.

You are generally not allowed to:

• systematically download from an e-resource, e.g. all articles from one issue of a journal, or an entire e-book. Publishers may monitor use levels of electronic resources and suspend access to this resource in the entire network of the institution if large amounts of information are downloaded in a short time period.
• share downloaded material with unauthorised users, i.e. anyone who is not a member of Eawag, Empa, PSI or WSL.
• use e-resources for commercial gain (i.e. reselling, redistributing or republishing licensed content).

Lib4RI is a member of DWA but hasn’t subscribed to DWA’s standards. However, we do have access to a small number of rules and regulations in addition to both DWA journals (KA and KW) since 1996. To access our member benefits, please contact @email to obtain our membership number. You will need it in order to self-register with DWA.

Most standardisation agencies still have print copies we can order. Please allow up to 2 weeks for shipment.

During the consultation period, SIA drafts are available as open access and can be downloaded at www.sia.ch/vernehmlassungen. Once the period is closed, drafts are no longer accessible and only the final text can be ordered.

The national standardisation agency provides the standard’s original publication language. Check the standard details provided within Lib4RI’s Standard Portal and find, for example, the issuing body as well as the original language. Note, sometimes standards are available in their local language aa well as English.

Lib4RI has licence agreements with several standardisation offices. In accordance to most licences we can store and distribute electronic copies of standards within the network of Eawag, Empa, PSI and WSL. There are, however, exceptions and to respect the copyright some standards are distributed in print only.

Due to strict copyright terms of use, it is not allowed to include full texts for these standards in the Lib4RI Standards Portal or to distribute them by other electronic means to the members of Eawag, Empa, PSI and WSL. Thus, DIN VDE standards are available as print copy only.

Each country, library and publisher has its individual copyright rules and regulations that need to be obeyed. You will receive a print copy if the licence stipulates that we are not allowed to transmit an electronic version of the paper.

We always try to obtain an electronic document as quick as possible. However, if the provider does not have the right to send a PDF copy, we will receive a fax copy. In such cases, the resolution is not as good as with PDF scans. Should you require good quality copies, please specify this in your request. We’ll then specifically ask for a print copy. Please note that shipment will take longer.

Typically, an article is available online one month prior to its print release. Due to usage restrictions and lower rates we might ask you to wait until the document is published in print. Please understand, like most other libraries we are unable to keep your request on hold.

E-books belong to the publisher. They are copyright protected and may only be shared within the licensed institution(s). Should the requested title not be part of our licence agreement you won’t be able to access the e-book. Unfortunately, other libraries aren’t allowed to give us access to their licensed e-books either. In many cases a print edition is directly available to you via swisscovery or can be ordered by us via interlibrary loan. If you consider an e-book title worthwhile to be licensed for your research institute please contact @email.

As the APC-funded model of OA publishing has grown, concerns have been raised over its sustainability. It is especially worrying that APCs are showing annual increases much beyond the rate of inflation. For example, the report Monitoring the Transition to Open Access (chapter 4) indicates a 16% increase in the average APC amount from 2013 to 2016 for the UK, while the Consumer Price Index rose only 5%. Data from 2005 to 2018 on the APCs paid by European institutions shows that from a mean APC of €858 in 2005, APCs have nearly doubled, to over €1600 in 2018 (Aasheim et al., 2019). These increases in APCs impose an unsustainable pressure on the budget of Lib4RI. To counteract escalating APCs, we introduced an APC cap of CHF 2500 (excl. VAT) in our Open Access Publication Fund. This is in line with the regulations of other European research institution (e.g. TU9-Guideline ; max. EUR 2000). It should also be noted that a price cap of CHF 2500 does exclude only very few, very expensive OA-Journals from funding. According to the OpenAPC database collecting data on APCs paid by European institutions, less than 5% of the OA-journals included in the database charge APCs of more than CHF 2500 (data: OpenAPC 2021).

In addition, an APC cap of 2500 CHF (excl. VAT) is also a requirement of the co-funding by the ETH Board for our Open Access Fund; see Co-funding by the ETH Board for our Open Access Fund – New APC cap.

First, an APC cap should both signal to researchers and to the publishing industry that Open Access needs to remain affordable. Partly funding APCs exceeding the APC price cap would not send this signal. Second, in most situations both parts of a “splitted APC” would ultimately be paid by Eawag, Empa, PSI or WSL. The splitting of the APC would increase the administrative effort for handling the invoice(s) and, therefore, even increase the actual costs.

There are three typical reasons why a journal is not indexed in DOAJ:

• The journal is a Hybrid Open Access journal (see above). Hybrid Open Access journals are not indexed in the DOAJ, only pure Open Access journals. Please also note that Hybrid Open Access Journals are excluded from funding.
• The journal does not meet the criteria for inclusion in DOAJ and was rejected by DOAJ. Avoid publishing in these journals.
• The journal is very new (< 6 months) and not yet indexed in the DOAJ. If this is the case, we might still cover the APC. Contact us!

We recommend our users to use the browser Firefox. If the links still don't work, please contact us at @email.

Please have a look at our Content Policy to be sure about the formats and lengths accepted of your paper. Please note, that we do not record publications that are not directly related to the research institutes (e.g. from your work at previous employers).

You can submit your publication during the whole year (recommended), directly after it is available online. The last date for submitting a publication for the current reporting year is always at the 10th of December and will be pronounced via e-mail. Every publication which reaches us after this date will be counted in the following reporting year.

At the right side on every record you can find feedback forms, available for different cases you may want to report. By clicking on one of these options an online form opens for you to fill in. This information (including the persistent URL of the publication) is then sent to @email for us to evaluate.

We currently use three different symbols to indicate the availability of full texts in DORA:

• The open-green lock is used for all open-access documents, i.e. the full text is available to everyone with internet access.
• The open-yellow lock is used for closed-access articles that are, however, available internally to members of the 4 Research Institutes. Please note, that the open-yellow lock symbol is only used within the network of the 4 Research Institutes. Authors are encouraged to submit an accepted version to DORA.
• The closed-grey lock is used for full texts that are not available to the general public.

Please note that publications before 2006 get only affiliated with the institute itself but not with a specific department.

Some publishers make publications available free of charge to the reader (for a limited time) but do not allow any reuse of the publications. The publication is under exclusive copyright of the publisher and any reuse by other needs permission by the copyright holder. This kind of free online access is also known as gratis Open Access. Gratis Open Access removes price barriers from access to publications but it allows no uses beyond what is considered legitimate under copyright. Gratis Open Access publications cannot be re-published Open Access on DORA because of these permission barriers.

Libre Open Access means free of charge and free of at least some permission barriers.  This means that the article is free for some kinds of further use and reuse, e.g. re-publishing the article Open Access on DORA. Permission barriers are removed by a license or statement permitting uses that would otherwise be impermissible. The open licences from Creative Commons (CC licences) are the most commonly used licences in the area of science and research. Publications licensed under a Creative Commons license can be re-published Open Access in DORA.

Open Access is not as simple as free of charge to reader. There are many different degrees of openness between Closed Access and Open Access. The guide HowOpenIsIt? Gives a concise overview of the shades of Open Access.

An accepted version is the version of your publication after peer-review and acceptance, but without the publisher's formatting. Very often the publisher allows to publish the accepted version after an embargo time as open access in an institutional repository. Send us your accepted version and we will check this for you. For detailed information to Open Access (Gold road, Green road) and benefits for uploading an Accepted Version please see here.

A submitted version is the version of your publication before peer-review and acceptance, i.e. the version you submit to the journal. Please note, we do not record submitted versions in DORA. For further details please have a look at our Content Policy.

Copyright is jointly shared by all natural persons who contributed to the creation of a work.

The corresponding author speaks on behalf of all authors of a work. He or she has no extended copyrights for the respective work.

If you are an employee in one of the four research institutes Eawag, Empa, PSI or WSL, you are in general authorised to publish the work you authored, provided all your co-authors agree.

Commonly, this questions targets US or Commonwealth governmental employees. Here, copyright holder is the organization, not the author(s).

Open Access means that scholarly articles can be freely accessed. Whether and to which degree they can be re-used is defined in the actual license under which it is published. You will have to determine the license for any work you want to re-use.

This depends on the policy of the publisher with whom the manuscript was published.

A comprehensive list on policies across publishers for embedding published manuscripts into a thesis can be found here: https://github.com/tuub/theses-publisher-policies/blob/master/policies.md