The increasing acquisition of commercial publications in digital form presents all scientific institutions with the challenge of making these contents permanently available via a suitable infrastructure. There is consensus that a national strategy is indispensable, both for reasons of cost and because of the technical and organisational requirements of the task. Such a strategy should be developed and implemented without delay. This will be even more urgent when, in accordance with the e-only principle, scientific publications are acquired and retained solely in electronic form.

A national hosting strategy seeks to establish and operate an efficient hosting infrastructure for the storage of digital texts. This will guarantee sustainable access to licensed commercial publications as well as to retro-digitised materials.

The Alliance of German Science Organisations has agreed to develop and implement a joint strategy for the national hosting of licensed commercial publications and other media acquired in licensed form. The core component of such an infrastructure is a repository in which data can be reliably stored. This storage system will not come with its own user interface, but will instead function as a back-end, equipped with standard access interfaces and services.

The Alliance of German Science Organisations is aware that this requires new infrastructure and that this new infrastructure is as fundamentally important to the research community as the development of electronic library databases and specialist information systems was in earlier years.