FulDok stands for the Fulda document server of Fulda University of Applied Sciences (HFD). The system is operated by the Fulda University, State and Public Library (HLSB) in conjunction with the Hessian library information system hebis. Editorial support is provided by the HLSB.

As a member of Fulda University of Applied Sciences, you can publish electronic documents free of charge and easily on FulDok.

FulDok is a service provided by HLSB that ensures the publication, management, archiving and use of your electronic documents.

• Free publication option
• Easy distribution and accessibility
• Long-term availability (at least 10 years according to the principles of Good Scientific Practice)
• Indexing of dissertations in the German National Bibliography
• Findability in general and scientific search engines such as Google and BASE
• All documents published on FulDok are given an identifier called DOI (Digital Object Identifier), which can be used to find and retrieve them permanently worldwide

Members and affiliates of the HFD (in accordance with HessHG § 37) and institutions and persons associated with it can publish. These are:

• Professors, lecturers and research assistants
• Technical-administrative staff
• Doctoral Candidates
• Students (with recommendation)
• Central facilities and departments of the university
• Employees in projects located at the HFD
• Scientific partners of the HFD

FulDok is used for the publication of full texts. The following publication types can be selected:

• Working paper
• Bachelor thesis
• Report (e.g. conference or research report)
• Book (monographs and anthologies)
• Dissertation or habilitation
• Conference publication (e.g. paper or poster)
• Teaching material (e.g. lecture notes or presentations)
• Master thesis
• Periodical (e.g. newsletter)
• Preprint
• Review
• Study paper (e.g. seminar or project work)
• Parts of a book
• Parts of a periodical
• Scientific article
• Other publication (for all publication types that cannot be assigned to any of the other categories)

In order to be able to submit a document, registration is necessary. To do this, you need a valid e-mail address of Fulda University of Applied Sciences. If you do not (or no longer) have such an e-mail address, please contact fuldok-hlsb@hs-fulda.de.

It serves to provide legal protection for the contracting parties. It sets out the legal framework for publication. Without it, a publication cannot be activated. You can view the text of the agreement at any time in advance on the FulDok website under the menu item "About FulDok". You will be asked to agree to the contract when you complete the publication process on FulDok. Consent to the contract is made by means of the corresponding checkbox. A handwritten signature is not required.

As a general rule, the file formats must be suitable for public distribution and, above all, for long-term archiving.

Files that are to be published on FulDok must be available as PDF or ideally as PDF/A without password and/or copy protection. Instructions for creating PDF/A files can be found here.

If you have any questions about this, you can reach the FulDok team at fuldok-hslb@hs-fulda.de.

Quality control is carried out by the editorial team with regard to formal criteria. There is no quality control in terms of content.

• With the conclusion of the publication contract, changes can only be made by the editorial team until the time of publication.
• Changing or deleting documents is not provided.
• Corrected versions will be imported as a new version. They will receive a new DOI.
• In exceptional cases, access to a document can be blocked.

If the formal criteria are met, the publication will be published online as soon as possible. You will be informed about the activation by email.

• The documents are guaranteed to be available for 10 years. Long-term archiving is sought.
• The metadata that describes the document is available without a time limit.

Dissertations are subject to the obligation to publish. If you publish it on FulDok, you comply with this obligation. The conditions are set out in the doctoral regulations that apply to you. The Reaction Team will assist you with the release. As a rule, the publication of dissertations on FulDok requires confirmation from the doctoral committee responsible for you.

If you would like to publish your Bachelor or Master thesis on FulDok, you will need a publication recommendation from the first reviewer. You upload the publication recommendation directly during the publication process. The form must be completed, signed and sent to fuldok-hslb@hs-fulda.de. A detailed description of the process for publishing theses can be found in the Intranet of the university.

HFD students can use FulDok to publish work on FulDok that has been created in the context of seminars or projects during their studies, for example. This requires a publication recommendation from the professor who led the seminar or project. The form must be completed, signed and sent to fuldok-hslb@hs-fulda.de.

Publications uploaded to FulDok are usually available in Open Access. Usage licenses may vary from document to document.

A special form are open access publications with an embargo. These are only freely accessible after the embargo period has expired.

According to the Copyright Act, you as the author of a document own all exploitation rights.

If you first publish on FulDok (first publication), you grant HFD and HLSB the non-exclusive right of use by concluding the publication agreement. For you, this means that you can also publish your publication elsewhere in the future, e.g. with a publishing house, in a journal or in another repository.

Always inform any publisher with whom you may wish to publish your work at a later date that you first published on FulDok.

If you publish your document with a publishing house in closed access, you usually transfer an exclusive right of use to the publisher when you conclude the publishing contract. This goes hand in hand with the loss of the simple right of use for you as an author.

It is often possible to contractually obtain a right to secondary publication (often in the form of a preprint or postprint). An overview of the publishers' standard conditions for making publications available in Open Access can be found in the Open Policy Finder database (formerly SHERPA/RoMEO). However, the contract you have signed is always decisive.

A right to secondary publication (§ 38 para. 1 UrhG) after the expiry of an embargo period of 12 months generally exists if your text is published in a regularly appearing publication and has been financed to at least 50% from funds that are not part of the basic budget of the HFD (third-party funds).

• A preprint is a version of a scientific article that has not yet undergone a review process by a publisher or journal. If the preprint has been submitted to a journal for publication but has not yet been accepted, it is also referred to as a submitted version.
• A postprint is a scientific publication that has undergone the review process of a publisher or journal and has been accepted for publication. A postprint can either be the version already published by the publisher or journal (publisher's version, version of record) or the accepted manuscript version that has not yet been converted to the publisher's layout (author accepted version).

If you are unsure which type of publication the document you want to upload corresponds to, please contact the editorial team.

The ORCID iD is an identifier for scientists used worldwide, which is provided free of charge by a non-profit initiative. The advantages of using the ORCID iD are:

• ORCID enables the presentation of one's own scientific profile on the Internet
• Previously disseminated information is brought together in your ORCID profile in a standardized way and offers an overview of your research performance
• Publications, research data and other digital products (e.g. software) of research processes are always linked to the correct person by specifying the ORCID iD
• ORCID makes it easy to maintain your publication list
• ORCID enables links to the Common Standards File (GND), a service of the German National Library and all German library networks, in order to facilitate the unambiguous identification of authors

For more information, see https://orcid.org/.

Creative Commons licenses are internationally applicable, standardized licenses of use with the help of which you as the author determine the legal conditions under which your publication can be reused. You have these options:

	Creative Commons BY 4.0	Attribution to the creator
	Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0	Attribution to the creator Adaptations of the work under the same conditions
	Creative Commons BY-ND 4.0	Attribution to the creator No derivatives or adaptations of the work are permitted
	Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0	Attribution to the creator Noncommercial use of the work is permitted
	Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0	Attribution to the creator Noncommercial use of the work is permitted Distribution of adaptations of the work under the same conditions
	Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0	Attribution to the creator Noncommercial use of the work is permitted No derivatives or adaptations of the work are permitted

However, you may only grant such a license if you own the necessary rights to your work.

For technical reasons, an export of metadata as a CSV file is currently only possible for the FulDok team.

You can use RSS feeds to get up-to-date information about new publications uploaded to FulDok. FulDok provides a list of the most recently published documents at the bottom of the FulDok homepage in the " Recent Submissions" section.