Cooperative Management of Electronic Journals

We are pleased about your interest in the Electronic Journals Library (EZB). The EZB is an infrastructure for academic literature and information provision relating to electronic journals. It serves as a search platform, provides information on scholarly publishing, and offers bibliographic and licensing information for libraries, library consortia, and other information infrastructures. More than 670 participating institutions currently use the EZB. In addition, its data and services are reused by Virtual Subject Libraries, Specialized Information Services for Research (FIDs), and other information infrastructures. 

The EZB offers libraries and research institutions a cooperative framework for managing electronic journals, as well as a range of institution-specific services, including:

• Information on more than 120,000 e-journals across all subject areas, including 87,000 freely available titles
• Simple and convenient management and presentation of your own academic e-journal licenses via a central EZB interface
• A wide range of options for customising the EZB interface to suit local requirements
• Use and maintenance of title data, including URLs, by all participating EZB user institutions
• Automated import of license data from consortium-managed journal packages
• Simple integration of license data from a wide range of publisher packages or aggregator databases
• Export of license information to third-party systems
• Reuse of EZB data and services in library networks, library catalogs, Specialized Information Services for Research (FIDs), and other information infrastructures
• Retrieval of exports and statistics
• Participation in EZB training courses and topic-specific consultation sessions, which are offered several times a year
  Exchange within the EZB community

The EZB offers ist useres:

• An overview of freely accessible e-journals and those licensed by the respective institution
• Standardised access to e-journals and their full texts via an institution-specific user interface in German and English
• Traffic light symbols to indicate access status at participating institutions
  institution-specific availability searches via the EZB linking service
• Focused support for authors at your institution, including:
  • Contact details for the publication service
  • Journal-specific guidance on publishing
  • Cost transparency based on average publication costs
  • Information on the coverage of publication costs
  • Information on secondary publication in Open Access

Become an EZB user institution

The EZB is financed as a shared infrastructure through contributions from participating institutions. The amount of the user contribution depends on the type and size of the institution and helps to ensure the long-term sustainability of operations, support and quality assurance.

EZB user institutions receive institution-specific services. These include, in particular, customised EZB views, license data services, export and data delivery services, as well as other user-specific configuration and support services. This is subject to the conclusion of an EZB user agreement.

The amount of the annual user fee depends on the type and size of the institution, plus applicable VAT:

In addition, the EZB maintains a wide range of partnerships with national and international services and supports them financially wherever possible:

• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
• Verein open-access.network e.V. (EZB as founding and association member)
• LAS:eR project of the hbz

Thanks to its extensive networking, the Electronic Journals Library is an important part of the infrastructure for providing scientific literature and information. It can now proudly look back on more than 25 years of successful development, which has been made possible largely through the continuous and reliable support of its user institutions. We would like to express our sincere thanks for this long-standing trust and commitment.

Are you interested in the EZB? Then please contact: info.ezb@ur.de.