Edition Open Access is dormant

Edition Open Access was a project initiated in 2010 in Department I of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (MPIWG). The aim was to explore innovative and open access methods of publication for its research output. Initial emphasis was placed on the publication of annotated editions of source volumes from the Institute’s rare book collection. Further motivation in launching the project was related to the prohibitive costs involved in the publishing, purchasing, and accessibility of scientific books, and also the increasing lack of professional editorial support by commercial publishers.

Supplementing the primary source editions, three other types of publications were conceived: Studies (with interdisciplinary approaches to one subject matter), Proceedings (of conferences and workshops), and Textbooks. In 2013, an agreement between the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the University of Oklahoma Library, both of which conserve large rare book collections, led to a division of the original platform. The Sources series was relaunched as Edition Open Sources, while the other three series were grouped under the name Max Planck Research Library for the History and Development of Knowledge. The brand Edition Open Access was retained and repurposed as an open access portal, which offered general information on open access and provided links to associated projects.

No restrictions were placed on participating projects; the sole requirement was that their publications comply with the principles of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities of 2003. With support from a grant provided by the German Federal Ministry for Research and Education, the publication platform was enhanced, modularized, and re-designed in 2018–2019 so that it could be offered to like-minded initiatives using an open-source license. One notable partner project that launched using the general concept and software of Edition Open Access is Edizioni Ca Foscari, an established open access publication venue housed at Venice University Press.

The project ended in 2020 when it’s funding came to an end. The platform was then migrated to the Institute’s library, where a permanent storage solution was established for the 42 diamond open access volumes published over the project’s ten-year run. All of these titles remain listed in the DOAB repository and a number of them were favourably reviewed in journals such as Isis. The EOA project made innovative and unique contributions to the diamond open access publishing model. A future EOA would ideally focus on digital publishing only for creative academic publishing solutions.