OAPEnz

Encyclopedic handbooks are important inventories and reference points for scientific research and teaching. Therefore is highly desirable to publish them in Open Access. However, the humanities, social and educational sciences still hesitate to participate in Open Access. The joint project "OAPEnz" of Verlag Barbara Budrich and ZB MED – Information Centre for Life Sciences addresses this issue and makes innovative OA publication formats accessible to disciplines beyond STM.

The core of the project is the publication of a "living" encyclopedic handbook edited by the German Political Science Association on the topic of "Politics and Gender", which will be published successively in Gold Open Access and additionally at regular intervals as an eBook with print-on-demand option in the publishing programme.
Besides the handbook publication and the development of a sustainable business model for similar publications, the project also includes the advancement of the PUBLISSO publication platform of ZB MED. In the end, PUBLISSO will become a freely usable publishing solution for small and medium-sized publishers as well as university presses, which can be adapted to publication formats commonly used in the humanities and social sciences. The developments of the PUBLISSO platform will be made available open source to other scientific and academic publishers.