Since the foundation of the Max Planck Institute of the History of Science in 1994, it is one of the Institute's concerns to make primary source materials available in digital form together with developing advanced tools and instruments to adequately support scholarly work. ECHO - Cultural Heritage Online (http://echo.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/home) as an open access repository and research environment is the most prominent outcome of this endeavor. Based on this experience, issues of motivation, collection building strategies, specific tool development, open access as primary prerequisite (Berlin Declaration; http://oa.mpg.de/lang/en-uk/berlin-prozess/berliner-erklarung/), research collaboration and trans-disciplinarity will be raised. With ECHO it has become possible to change the traditional ways in which scholarship in the Humanities is documented and to make research results more transparent. Reflecting on changing notions of "the document" and on information economy, novel ways of disseminating research results will be presented (e.g. Edition Open Access; http://www.edition-open-access.de/). Finally, problems of organizing quality control, of long-term sustainability, and of gaining recognition in evaluation procedures will be addressed.