The Knowledge Exchange & Outreach department currently consists of three teams (Training, Publications, and Library & Open Access) whose products and services build bridges externally and internally by working directly in and with the community on the one hand, and on the other hand by carrying out central activities within GESIS itself and supporting the scientific departments with services. For example, the teams in the department are responsible for GESIS training, open access publications, the GESIS journals and publication series, and the library. A detailed presentation of the teams' areas of competence is given below.
For example, the teams in the department are responsible for GESIS training, open access publications, the GESIS journals and publication series, and the library. A detailed presentation of the teams' areas of competence is given below.
Our Teams
Library & Open Access
The Library & Open Access team supports the implementation of Open Access, i.e. free access to scientific information and publications in the social sciences. To this end, the team of scientists, librarians and computer scientists operates the Social Science Open Access Repository (SSOAR) on the one hand, which is based on close cooperation with publishers, chairs, research institutions and research groups and is essentially an infrastructure for the long term archiving of publications.. SSOAR is also an aggregator for LeibnizOpen, the Leibniz Association's open-access portal.
On the other hand, the team promotes Open Access Publishing (Golden Open Access) at GESIS through a goal-oriented licensing policy of the library. In addition, the reference library at both locations maintains a unique collection of empirical social research and applied informatics, which is easily searchable via the library catalogue. A special feature is the linking of library holdings to research data in the GESIS data stock catalogue.
The team provides advice on legal and technical issues relating to Open Access and is regularly represented at relevant conferences. Individual team members actively represent GESIS in the relevant working groups of the Leibniz Association, the “Open Access Working Group" and the "Libraries and Information Centres Working Group", where they often give important impulses and take suggestions for their own work.
Historical Social Research is an international journal which covers quantitative and qualitative social research, historical sociology, social scientific history and digital humanities (and ranked in the Social Science Citation Index). The journal methods, data, analyses focuses on research questions related to quantitative methods with special emphasis on survey methodology. Social Indicators Information Service (ISI) is considered as a contribution to on-going social reporting. ISI aims to also reach out to the interested non-academic readers who may not necessarily have a background in the social sciences. Furthermore, the GESIS in-house series include various publications formats ranging from practice-oriented representation of survey research to reports on major research activities. Furthermore, we are involved in the transfer journal easy and the GESIS-Blog.
Training
The team Training organizes the scientific training program in social research methods for researchers from the social sciences and neighboring disciplines. Current topics are covered by compact workshops as well as longer, modular seminars. GESIS training formats include the GESIS Spring Seminar, the GESIS Summer School in Survey Methodology, the GESIS Fall Seminar in Computational Social Sciences , and the GESIS Workshops.
