Editorial Department

The Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory publishes both its own research results and those connected with the work at the Institute. One of the tasks of the editorial department is to disseminate and increase the visibility of these results through a variety of publication channels, including established and more recently established book series, journals and a Research Paper Series. While much of the scholarly output is still published in printed form, its availability online and in Open Access continues to grow.

The ten-member editorial team is thus engaged in a broad scope of activities, ranging from advising potential authors and cooperating with publishers to producing the Institute's own publications in various languages. The editorial staff is responsible for publication management, the procedures for peer review, typesetting, editing and proofreading of the manuscripts before they go to press.

When it comes to the production of the Institute's publications, the editorial department pursues a number of different paths. On the one hand, we cooperate with the Frankfurt-based publishing house Vittorio Klostermann. Here, the texts for the book series and the journal Rechtsgeschichte – Legal History are all prepared in-house, and we take care of the imprimatur as well. This collaboration produces about a dozen monographs and collected volumes each year. On the other, the editorial department has developed several publication series in recent years that are now available in Open Access. These include the online version of the journal Rg, the book series Global Perspectives on Legal History (also available as print-on-demand) and the Research Paper Series (on SSRN).

In order to enhance the visibility, in particular, of the electronic publications, we are integrating them into relevant repositories and online platforms. The editorial staff also performs the digital data preparation and maintains the homepages in this area. As part of the Open Access activities, older publications that were previously only available in analogue form are gradually being made available to the scientific community in digital form in the coming years.

Teaser Image: CC-BY 2.5 Hermann Zapf

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