Author support

As the Open Access publishing service of the Hamburg State and University Library, Hamburg University Press enables you to publish the first edition of your book freely available in electronic form as well as simultaneously as a printed edition to be purchased. Furthermore, we offer the hosting of Open Access journals on our journal server.

Publication support for monographs and edited volumes

Our support covers aspects of formal, legal and technical quality assurance depending on the agreed service.

You want to publish a book with us?  Please contact us. If publication with us is possible in principle, we will provide you with an online questionnaire. This will support you by asking for all the information you need. Our further support depends on the publication format and the agreed services.
Information on the publication process can be found here.

Dissertations

Hamburg University Press offers a lean and affordable publishing option for dissertations. The PhD theses are published under a CC-BY license and appear simultaneously digitally freely available as well as in printed form (softcover).
Publication is subject to the following conditions:

  • Typesetting by the author:
    Hamburg University Press will provide you with a typesetting template (MS Word) and introduce you to its use in a two-hour training session on a Windows PC. We will also provide you with training material and will be available to answer any questions you may have. Step-by-step instructions will show you how to insert your own Word document into the publisher's template and what else needs to be done during typesetting.
  • Illustrations
    You do not need to insert illustrations in your manuscript, we will do that for you. The number of illustrations should be kept within a manageable range (up to 15 illustrations can be handled reasonably well).
  • Title, table of contents, other indexes:
    The publisher creates the title, the table of contents and the other indexes.
  • Proofreading - compliance with publishing guidelines:

Professional proofreading is obligatory in the publishing house. In order to keep costs low, proofreading can be omitted if you assure us that your work has been professionally reviewed as part of the doctoral process. In any case, you are required to make linguistic and formal standardizations in accordance with our publishing guidelines. We recommend that you also have your work professionally proofread.
If you are interested in publishing with us, please contact us.

Alternatively, you can publish your dissertation digital only on the University of Hamburg's Dissertationsserver (contact: email  diss@sub.uni-hamburg.de, phone +49 40/42838-2236).

Scholar-friendly contracts

Hamburg University Press will conclude an author or editor contract with you. In this contract, you transfer non-exclusive rights of use to Hamburg University Press for agreed forms of publication. We will provide you with templates for obtaining the rights of use of the contributing authors. With regard to books, Hamburg University Press practices "Gold Open Access"; this means that an online version is made freely available on the website at the same time as a print publication. A parallel publication on another server (so-called self-archiving or "Green Open Access") is of course possible, provided that the first publication is mentioned.

Since 2017, Hamburg University Press supports you in licensing your publication with a so-called Creative Commons license. Such a license regulates the subsequent use by third parties. A clear regulation of subsequent use supports and facilitates the sustained visibility of your work. The licenses CC BY 4.0 and CC-BY-SA 4.0 are prerequisites for Open Science and are therefore applied to the publication with Hamburg University Press.
If you are interested, please contact us.

... Journals

Hamburg University Press offers hosting of peer-reviewed open access journals (please check About the offer).