In 1966, the ZBW received the status of a central subject library for economics in Germany, and was admitted to the joint funding system of the Federal and Länder Governments.

At the same time it integrated the library of the Hamburg Institute of International Economics and became the publisher of the journals Wirtschaftsdienst and Intereconomics.

Its mandate is to acquire, to index, and to archive theoretical and empirical literature and subject-specific information from economics and business studies, and to provide access to these materials to the general public on a national basis.

More than 134,000 full-texts (working papers, articles from journals, conference proceedings) from German research institutes and universities are available online and free of charge on the repository EconStor.

[9][7] The ZBW creates content-descriptive metadata not only for books, but also for articles in journals and working papers, i.e. they are indexed with keywords (descriptors) from the Standard Thesaurus for Economics.

The ZBW maintains the search portal EconBiz containing more than 10 million datasets of bibliographic references for economics and business studies.

The ZBW also offers an online reference service, Research Guide EconDesk,[10] which provides guidance for literature and data searches in economics and business studies.

Editors can deposit datasets and other material relating to empirical articles and provide access to them in order to enable reproducibility of published research findings.

[29] This Europe-wide cooperation of infrastructure providers and research institutes wants to establish the topic of Open Science in the scholarly community.

He is a member of the G7 Open Science Working Group and the German Council for Scientific Information Infrastructures, which is part of the Digital Agenda of the Federal Government.

[34] The latest project in this context is German Research Data Infrastructure GeRDI,[16] which has been initiated in 2016 and is coordinated by the ZBW.