FAQ

General

general
  • Lib4RI is the joint library of the 4 research institutes within the ETH domain: Eawag, Empa, PSI and WSL. Lib4RI provides online access to some 40,000 e-journals, almost 1 mio e-books and holds a total of over 100,000 print books for loan. Please see Lib4RI-Info: Lib4RI at a Glance for a summary of all our services. Lib4RI is not to be confused with the independent libraries of ETH Zurich or EPF Lausanne albeit many of their print titles are shared via swisscovery, the catalogue of the Swiss Library Service Platform (SLSP).

    Electronic resources such as databases, e-journals and e-books in the subscription of Lib4RI are accessible to all affiliates of Eawag, Empa, PSI and WSL within the IP-range of their institute. Should you have access issues please refer to the corresponding FAQ or contact @email.

    To allow for book and other loans from Lib4RI a registration with swisscovery is required.

    Lib4RI also provides several publication services and hosts the institutional repository DORA managing the scientific output of Eawag, Empa, WSL and PSI.

    Additionally, Lib4RI offers regular trainings on topics such as basic & advanced searching, scientific publishing, Open Access, copyright, LaTeX, Endnote or research data management.

    Please see Lib4RI-Info: Lib4RI at a Glance for a summary of all our services.

  • Swisscovery the nationwide library system operated by the Swiss Library Service Platform (SLSP). Lib4RI has joined the SLSP network together with more than 490 other academic libraries from all over Switzerland. The swisscovery catalogue contains more than 30 million titles including books, serials, journals and non-book materials. Most documents can be ordered online. Note that electronic resources such as e-journals, e-books and databases are generally not shared between swisscovery libraries and their organisations.

    You need to register with swisscovery to be able to borrow books and other media. For frequently asked questions related to the registration with swisscovery please refer to the dedicated swisscovery 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.

  • With your Lib4RI / swisscovery library account you can

    You can find more details on services offered by Lib4RI in the information leaflet Lib4RI-Info: Lib4RI at a Glance.

  • 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:

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

Databases

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

    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 licence agreements between the library Lib4RI and the respective publishers. These licences 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 third parties (unauthorised users, i.e. anyone who is not a member of Eawag, Empa, PSI or WSL). Third party use is also uploading licensed content or data to external platforms, specifically ChatGPT or other AI platforms, where storage and future use are controlled by third parties.
    • use e-resources for commercial gain (i.e. reselling, redistributing or republishing licensed content).

    If you are planning to use licensed electronic resources for a text data mining or an AI project, please contact us at @email and we will help you clarify the conditions.

     

    Restrictions on using electronic resources from AIP

    From AIP, the American Institute of Physics, we got a longer list of Terms of Use (which is, at least more liberal and allows for instance the delivery to a colleague).

Articles & journals

articles_journals
  • Should a journal article not be part of our online subscription (check with Lib4RI's E-Journal List), Lib4RI’s document delivery service is happy to order it for you. More details are available in Lib4RI-Info: Articles & Journals, including a how-to-guide.

    Lib4RI document deliveries are free of charge for members of Eawag, Empa, PSI and WSL.

  • 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 licence agreements between the library Lib4RI and the respective publishers. These licences 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 third parties (unauthorised users, i.e. anyone who is not a member of Eawag, Empa, PSI or WSL). Third party use is also uploading licensed content or data to external platforms, specifically ChatGPT or other AI platforms, where storage and future use are controlled by third parties.
    • use e-resources for commercial gain (i.e. reselling, redistributing or republishing licensed content).

    If you are planning to use licensed electronic resources for a text data mining or an AI project, please contact us at @email and we will help you clarify the conditions.

     

    Restrictions on using electronic resources from AIP

    From AIP, the American Institute of Physics, we got a longer list of Terms of Use (which is, at least more liberal and allows for instance the delivery to a colleague).

Books

books
  • 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.

  • If you are registered with Lib4RI / SLSP as an affiliate of the four federal research institutes, you can order books via the swisscovery platform directly to your office location. This includes all main offices as well as the branches of Eawag (Dübendorf & Kastanienbaum), Empa (Dübendorf, St Gallen, Thun), PSI (Villigen) and WSL (Birmensdorf, Davos, Cadenazzo, Lausanne, Sion).

    Please refer to this table for the appropriate «pickup institution» and «pickup location» to choose during your swisscovery order and for details on how to obtain and return books.

    Please also see our information leaflets for users at Eawag Kastanienbaum, Empa St Gallen, Empa Thun, and WSL Davos.

  • 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:

    Please contact us via @email, or call the library at 058 765 5700 if you encounter any problem with the access to e-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 licence agreements between the library Lib4RI and the respective publishers. These licences 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 third parties (unauthorised users, i.e. anyone who is not a member of Eawag, Empa, PSI or WSL). Third party use is also uploading licensed content or data to external platforms, specifically ChatGPT or other AI platforms, where storage and future use are controlled by third parties.
    • use e-resources for commercial gain (i.e. reselling, redistributing or republishing licensed content).

    If you are planning to use licensed electronic resources for a text data mining or an AI project, please contact us at @email and we will help you clarify the conditions.

     

    Restrictions on using electronic resources from AIP

    From AIP, the American Institute of Physics, we got a longer list of Terms of Use (which is, at least more liberal and allows for instance the delivery to a colleague).

Standards

standards
  • There are a few issues you could encounter. Please try the following solutions:

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

  • Lib4RI's Standards Portal offers online access to the full texts of a growing number of standards, currently including more than 2'000 SN and DIN, and all ASTM standards. Except for ASTM (full subscription), full texts are purchased on request. Please note, due to specific licence agreements not all previously acquired standards can be made accessible via «Lib4RI's Standards Portal». Missing full texts can be requested from within the standards portal via the link resolver button Get-it-button and our «Document Delivery Service». More details on Lib4RI's Standard Portal can be found here.

    Note: We also have subscribed to the fulltext of some standards that cannot be found within Lib4RI's Standard Portal. These need to be accessed directly via the respective provider. Currently, they include the SVGW Guidelines.

  • Licensed full text is indicated within Lib4RI’s Standards Portal by a document icon next to your search result. You can download the available full text directly by clicking on the green triangle. Should the document icon be missing, Lib4RI's link resolver button «Get-it-at-Lib4RI» appears when clicking on the triangle. From within the opening link resolver window you can then complete and send us a standards order form («Document Delivery Service»).

    Should you submit your request via the standards ordering form, allow a few days for the delivery of the full text. If electronic submission of the full text is prohibited by its provider we will send you a print copy of the standard via regular mail.

  • 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.

Document delivery

document_delivery
  • 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.

Open Access fund

open_access_fund
  • 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.

  • Hybrid Open Access describes a publishing model where some articles are made Open Access, against the payment of an APC, while other articles remain Closed Access, and the journal as a whole is subscription-based. The problem of Hybrid Open Access is the so called “double dipping”, i.e. paying twice to publish and read the same article. Publishers collect money when subscriptions are paid by the library and once more when authors are charged an APC to make their article Open Access. If the APC for the article is funded by the Open Access Fund, the Lib4RI pays twice for the same article.

    Technically, publishing an article Open Access as part of the Read & Publish agreements with Elsevier and Springer is also a form of Hybrid Open Access. However, double dipping is avoided here because reading access and Open Access publishing fees are covered by a flat fee to the publisher.

    Further reading:
    Mittermaier B. Double Dipping in Hybrid Open Access – Chimera or Reality? 2015.
    Matthias L. The worst of both worlds: Hybrid Open Access. OpenAIRE. 2018.

  • 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!

DORA

dora
  • 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.