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Treasured Works from De Gruyter Book Archive Are to Be Transitioned into Open Access

Domesday Books, National Archives, Kew, England, UK, December 30, 2008 | © Courtesy of Andrew Barclay/Flickr.
Domesday Books, National Archives, Kew, England, UK, December 30, 2008 | © Courtesy of Andrew Barclay/Flickr.

De Gruyter celebrates its 270th anniversary by gradually making 270 of its seminal back-list titles accessible in the Open Access format.

A Blog Post by Eric Merkel-Sobotta.


To celebrate the 270th anniversary of the publishing house, De Gruyter is in the course of permanently transferring  270 select valued works from its De Gruyter Book Archive (DGBA) into Open Access. Over the span of upcoming 10 months, 27 titles  will be made available to the general public globally on a monthly basis.

The DGBA project seeks to digitize the entire back-list of titles published from 1749 to the present, in order to ensure that future generations have digital access to the high-quality scholarly sources that De Gruyter has published over the centuries.

The treasures that are being made available include mostly German-language titles in theology, philosophy and medicine such as the essay “Traumaticismus und Infection” penned by the medical pioneer Rudolf Virchow in 1900. The titles that can be found on the DGBA Website comprise the correspondence between eminent theologians Friedrich Schleiermacher and Karl Gustav Brinckmann or Gottfried Wilhelm Fink’s book Häusliche Andachten from 1814.

The DGBA project, launched in 2018, is planned to be completed in 2020. At that point – after three years of digitization – 50,000 additional scholarly works will be accessible to researchers around the world. This project is aimed at not only documenting De Gruyter’s publishing history, but also contributing to the historiography and development of sciences and humanities, while expanding the number of out-of-print works that can be accessed digitally.

According to Carsten Buhr, Managing Director at De Gruyter, this “modest gesture […] underline[s] the important role De Gruyter has played in [the domain of] Open Access since 2005. Mostly, however, we are pleased that the DGBA project is successfully combining tradition and modernity.”

Written by by Eric Merkel-Sobotta

Edited by Pablo Markin


Featured Image Credits: Domesday Books, National Archives, Kew, England, UK, December 30, 2008 | © Courtesy of Andrew Barclay/Flickr.

This post is based on a press release that originally appeared in degruyter.com, 2/5/2019, https://www.degruyter.com/dg/newsitem/332/270-jahre-verlagsgeschichte-270-schtze-aus-dem-archiv-werden-open-access.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Pablo Markin (May 3, 2019). Treasured Works from De Gruyter Book Archive Are to Be Transitioned into Open Access. The DGO Blog. Retrieved March 16, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/132w9


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