Historical Studies

Historians are generally well disposed towards all forms of open access.

The number of open access journals and digital collections in the field of histo­rical studies is steadily growing. However, open access to monographs and edi­ted collections still has a way to go. Blogs are another form of publication used to distribute scholarly knowledge in this field.

Besides publications, freely available historical sources, especially in the form of digital reproductions and machine-readable digital editions, are of great impor­tance. Moreover, in the areas of digital humanities of relevance to historical studies, open access tools (e.g. for text mining) also play a role.

As of March 2024, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) listed almost 1,635 monographs and edited collections under the keyword History and under further keywords from the fields of history and auxiliary sciences. The OAPEN Online Library also provides access to full texts of publications on historical topics. As of March 2024, the publication platform OpenEdition listed 4,629 open access documents in several European languages under the keyword History.

The German-language university presses in the consortium AG Universitäts­verlage strongly support the open access movement. A large percentage of these presses publish monographs and edited collections from the humanities.

Within the framework of the transition to open access, scholarly publishers, for example Barbara Budrich, de Gruyter, transcript, Wachholtz, and Wallstein, increasingly offer authors – also from the historical sciences – the option of publishing their works in open access.

The Edition Open Sources, which is hosted by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), makes academic editions of primary sources available in open access.

Stand-alone publications funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), including publications on historical topics, are made available in open access in the FWF-E-Book-Library.

Gutenberg-e is a programme of the American Historical Association and Columbia University Press. The digital monographs published by Columbia University Press are freely accessible.

In the series Historisches Forum, themed issues with contributions and reports from the historical sciences are published in collaboration with Clio-Online and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Blogs

The humanities and social science blog portal Hypotheses is hosted by the open access service provider Open Edition. The portal provides a central plat­form for numerous blogs, including blogs on topics related to historical, archi­val, and auxiliary studies. As of December 2021, almost 250 blogs from the German-speaking area were listed under History & Archaeology. The Redak­tionsblog of the German-language Hypotheses portal serves to develop and disseminate scholarly information and to create a network.

Subject Portals and Platforms

Subject portals provide central points of entry for searches for open access publications, historical sources, and other materials.

• Clio online is a portal for historical studies. It is involved in numerous projects, for example subject portals and Zeitgeschichte online, the subject portal for contemporary historians. It is also involved in H-Soz-Kult.
• H-Soz-Kult is a moderated information and communication platform for historians; it publishes academic news and publications.
• historicum.net provides access to a wide range of resources from the field of historical studies.
• H-Net – Humanities and Social Sciences online provides a forum for academics in the humanities and social sciences.
• perspectivia.net, the publication platform of the Max Weber Foundation – German Humanities Institutes Abroad, provides free access to the full texts of journals, reviews, monographs, and conference proceedings (digital publications and retrodigitised versions of works) of its institutes and their cooperation partners.
• European History Online (EGO) publishes scholarly contributions on the history of Europe from 1450 to 1950. The contributions in English and German are linked to a range of different materials.
• The publisher Edition Topoi was established within the framework of the DFG-funded project Excellence Cluster Topoi (The Formation and Transfor­mation of Space and Knowledge in Ancient Civilizations, 2007-2019). Edition Topoi publishes monographs, edited collections, and journals; it also has a repository.

Databases

The Registry of Research Data Repositories re3data.org provides an overview of databases, also under the keyword History.

• Arachne is the central object database of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) and the Digital Archaeology Department at the Institute of Archaeology of the University of Cologne.
• The Archives Portal Europe provides access to, among other things, 285 million descriptive units of archives, in some cases with links to digital reproductions.
• Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance is an interdisciplinary research database devoted mainly to the classical tradition, a central focus of Renaissance studies.
• e-codices - Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland has set itself the goal of making all medieval manuscripts and a selection of modern manuscripts in Switzerland freely available via a virtual library. 
• The European Library: Within the framework of the EU project Europeana Newspapers, around 18 million pages were scanned and indexed. They can be searched at The European Library.
• At e-rara.ch, digitised printed works from the 15th to the 19th century held by Swiss Libraries are made available online to the public free of charge.
• The Regesta Imperii (RI) record in the form of German-language regesta (abstracts) all activities of the Roman-German kings and emperors from the Carolingians to Maximilian I (ca. 751–1519) and of the popes in the early and high Middle Ages that are evidenced by charters or other historical sources. The RI project provides a freely accessible literature database for medieval research in the entire European-language area, a regesta database, and publications.
• The Wörterbuch-Netz, a project of the Trier Center for Digital Humanities (Kompetenzzentrums für elektronische Erschließungs- und Publikations­verfahren in den Geisteswissenschaften) at the University of Trier, provides, among other things, dictionaries of the older levels of German.

The online archives JSTOR and Project MUSE now make open access content of relevance to historical studies available.