Open Access

About KrimZ

The Centre for Criminology (KrimZ), based in Wiesbaden, is the central research and documentation institution of the federal and state government for criminological-forensic research issues. According to its statutes, the aim of the institution is, among other things, to record and evaluate criminologically significant documents and to support bodies and persons active in criminological research.

Aims of the document server

The document server KrimPub serves besides providing own electronic publications of the KrimZ as an overarching federal-state publication infrastructure for making accessible and making searchable electronic publications of the judicial administrations and other institutions related to justice, which are intended for free public access and are of interest for criminological research and documentation.

Organisational regulations

The document server KrimPub is maintained by the KrimZ and technically operated by the Library Service Centre Baden-Wuerttemberg (BSZ). The KrimZ is the contact for all questions concerning the document server. The authors and editors are solely responsible for the content of the documents.

The KrimZ concludes framework agreements with the participating institutions on the use of electronic documents in KrimPub. The KrimZ may, by agreement, include selected online publications in the document server. Authorised bodies or persons can upload documents using an upload form. These are checked and activated by KrimZ.

Legal framework

If not regulated otherwise, the KrimZ is - with the upload of a document - granted the following simple rights of use:

• the right to electronic storage, in particular in databases
• the simple, non-exclusive and permanent right of use for making available to the public in national and international data networks
• the right to convert for the purpose of long-term archiving while preserving the integrity of the content (the original archiving is retained)
• the right to register and hand over to long-term archiving bodies, in particular the German National Library

Rightsholders can also grant creative commons licenses when uploading a document and thus grant more rights of use than provided by the copyright law.

Technical framework

The document server is operated on the basis of the open source software OPUS4.
The preferred file format for documents is PDF. Other suitable formats are permitted for multimedia resources, if necessary by arrangement. Executable files and dynamic documents cannot be accepted.
For long-term archiving electronic documents receive individual persistent identifiers in the form of URN addresses, which, with the help of the resolving mechanism of the German National Library, guarantee permanent citation.

Integrity and availability of documents

The KrimZ undertakes to keep documents published in KrimPub available within the scope of its technical and organisational capabilities. In the event of necessary data migration, it will ensure the integrity of the content of the data. However, according to the state of the art, the retention of the original layout (e.g. page breaks) cannot be guaranteed.

In principle, the deletion of long-term archived documents is not planned. Subsequent changes can be included in the form of a new document. In individual cases, a document can be deleted for compelling legal reasons (e.g. an author's appeal to his right of recall due to a change of conviction, inadvertent publication of trade secrets, violation of the rights of third parties).

Documents without long-term archiving can be deleted on request. Agreements concluded with the participating institutions shall apply.