Innovative electronic publishing project has proved a big success

Dynamic e-journal of relativity celebrates its 5th birthday: Publication concept now available for other fields of research

Five years ago, on January 26th, the electronic journal ”Living Reviews in Relativity” went online with its first article. Developed and published at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, this innovative journal has provided a reliable, high-quality scientific resource enhanced by advanced methods for online accessibility.
With a rapidly increasing number of users, this sophisticated service has proved to be a valuable tool for the scientific community.

”Living Reviews in Relativity” is an exclusively www-based journal, publishing reviews of research in all areas of relativity. ”Living Reviews” is unique in that it maintains a suite of high-quality reviews; its articles are subjected to strict peer-review and are kept current by the authors (hence the title Living reviews). Readers are therefore guaranteed to find quickly the most up-to-date overview on the state of research in each subject area of the field.

The "Living Reviews BackOffice", a joint project between the Heinz Nixdorf Center for Information Management in the Max Planck Society (ZIM) and the AEI, will now enable other Max Planck Institutes to publish similar e-journals in their own fields. The core infrastructure and services needed for these publications will be provided by the "Living Reviews BackOffice".

The success of ”Living Reviews in Relativity” is based on the commitment of its authors to keep their reviews up-to-date as a service to the scientific community, as well as on the fact that access to the journal is free of charge. Therefore, one of the strategic aims of the BackOffice project is to sustain this journal and all following Living Reviews journals as free ”Open Access” resources.