Newsletter

News from Pollux

1. Trial access for database Border and Migration Studies: Your feedback is important!

Until July 9th 2021 Pollux has trial access to the database Border and Migration Studies, which can be accessed via this link: https://www.pollux-fid.de/r/asp-bord. To get access, you have to be registered and logged in to Pollux - with an account as a political researcher.

Your feedback is relevant in our decision on whether to co-fund access to the database in the future.

• Is the database useful for your research?
• Would you use the database regularly for your research?
• What is missing?

Please write to us briefly to kontakt@pollux-fid.de or use the contact form on our website. Thank you!

About Border and Migration Studies

Border and Migration Studies Online provides historical context and resources, representing both personal and institutional perspectives, for the growing fields of border(land) studies and migration studies, as well as history, law, politics, diplomacy, area and global studies, anthropology, medicine, the arts, and more. At completion, the collection will include 100,000 pages of text, 175 hours of video, and 1,000 images. In collaboration with an international board of scholars, materials were selected and organized around fundamental themes such as:

• Border Identities
• Border Enforcement and Control
• Border Disputes
• Border Criminologies
• Maritime Borders
• Human Trafficking
• Sea Migration
• Undocumented and Unauthorized Migration
• Global Governance of Migration

Source: https://alexanderstreet.com/products/border-and-migration-studies-online

2. Publication on Pollux online survey

We published a paper about the results of our last years online survey in the open access journal o|bib Das offene Bibliotheksjournal. The paper titled “Ich habe mich noch nicht mit Pollux beschäftigt” - eine Zufriedenheits- und Bedarfsanalyse des Fachinformationsdienstes Politikwissenschaft can be accessed via: https://doi.org/10.5282/o-bib/5680 (German only)

Documentation of all questions and answers from the online survey in German and English can be found here: https://doi.org/10.26092/elib/429

We would like to thank everyone who took part in the survey for their effort!

Open Access

In our last newsletter we were looking for open access ambassadors. We would like to thank Dr. Philipp Schulz, Dr. Felix S. Bethke and Arndt Leininger, PhD very much for giving their voice for more open access in political science. As a result we produced three great videos, which you will find on our YouTube channel.

Do you have good reasons for publishing open access as well, or would you like to dispel a prejudice regarding open access? Feel free to contact us at kontakt@pollux-fid.de. or use the contact form on our website. We are looking for more ambassadors.

Tips & Tricks

Because it's so simple and perhaps already forgotten, here again our video on our secondary publication service at SSOAR, the largest social science open access repository.

Pollux, that is…

Thore Christiansen – Software developer

Who are the people behind Pollux? In each newsletter, we introduce one person from the Pollux team so that you can get to know us a little better.

This time: Thore Christiansen

My name is Thore Christiansen,

Since last December, I have been part of the Pollux team as a software developer. I look forward to optimizing the service and contributing my own new ideas.

Nowadays an online service like Pollux is much more than what you get to see when you visit www.pollux-fid.de. New ways of attacks appear almost daily, and most of them aim to steal personal data sets. Therefore, beside all the small changes you can see on the page, a large part of my work includes regularly checking the code for vulnerabilities and closing them to protect your data.

As the number of verified sources increases, so do the technical requirements for the system. Another focus in my work is to keep the performance and availability of the Pollux service at a consistently high level. Thanks to redundancy in our most important server systems, we were able to achieve completely uninterrupted availability last year; a benchmark we want to compete in the future.

After studying medical engineering with a focus on medical computer science at the University of Applied Sciences in Bremerhaven, I started my own business as a freelance software developer. In the past few years I have been able to gain extensive experience on very different projects and in many different industries.

As a Bremerhaven resident, I can be found on the water in my free time. In the sailing club I volunteer as a sailing trainer and in youth work. In addition, I organize and hold regattas on the Weser and North Sea as a race officer. If there is still time, I try to set the sails myself as often as possible.

Best wishes
Thore Christiansen

Contributions at conferences and events

19.2.2021 Meeting of the Pollux Scientific Advisory Board

25.2.2021 Workshop: Public relations in pandemic situation

11.3.2021 short presentation of Pollux at DVPW-Sektionstagung Politische Theorie und Ideengeschichte (Section for Political Theory of the German Political Science Association (GPSA))