Aims and Scope
For contact details and more information, please visit: Imprint
Main objectives
1. Open access book publishing in the humanities and social sciences
L’Harmattan Open Access is a book publishing platform created for the open access publication of academic monographs, edited volumes and scholarly editions. Our aim is to ensure that research in the humanities and social sciences is not only accessible but can also be searched for, cited and reused at an international level. Our main focus is on Diamond Open Access book publishing: developing a model in which the costs of publication are borne by the institutions conducting and funding the research, rather than by the authors and readers. (More about Costs)
2. Promoting multilingualism
One of the greatest assets of European scholarship is its linguistic diversity. Our platform currently supports content in Hungarian, English, German, and French, and is open to publishing in any European language, with a particular focus on Central European languages. In the interests of multilingual research in the humanities and social sciences, we make metadata available in the original language and in English in all cases, in accordance with international standards. Research produced in local languages thus joins the international scientific discourse at a new level of academic visibility.
3. AI-based semantic search and content discovery
Our bespoke AI tools, developed specifically for the humanities and social sciences, support multilingual semantic search, content discovery and automatic abstracting. Multilingual, automatically generated abstracts and semantic search are particularly important for long, complex academic works, where relevant content can be uncovered not simply through keywords but through conceptual relationships. The aim is never to replace human expertise, but to efficiently support researchers’ discoveries.
4. Quality assurance, professional oversight, peer review
L'Harmattan Open Access guarantees a professionally vetted academic publication process. The quality of the scholarly content is ensured by international editorial boards, institutional partners and independent reviewers. The publisher’s work provides formal quality assurance, metadata tagging, DOI registration and standardised digital presentation, and also incorporates an expanded metadata set and the use of persistent identifiers. The DOI, ORCID, ROR, Creative Commons licence and complete reference list together ensure that the volumes are ready for both human and machine reading, researcher searches, citation and database integration. (More info for authors)
L’Harmattan Open Access strives to meet the highest international open access, book industry, and research infrastructure standards throughout the entire academic book publishing process in a transparent manner. Its workflows are based on the FAIR Principles, the PALOMERA Recommendations, the OASPA transparency criteria, and the data management practices of DOI, ORCID, ROR, Crossref, ONIX, MARC, KBART, and OAI-PMH. (How FAIR is our operation?)
5. Distribution, archiving and international presence
L’Harmattan Open Access distributes the volumes to international research databases, repositories, library systems and search engines. The distribution of publications, in collaboration with Thoth Open Metadata, takes place via OAPEN, DOAB, EBSCO, ProQuest, Google Books, OCLC and Web of Science, amongst others; in terms of international archiving, the MTA KIK REAL repository, the Thoth Archiving Network and the Internet Archive also play a role. The aim is to ensure long-term preservation, measurable visibility and increased scholarly impact. (More about Distribution)
From traditional book publishing to innovative scholarly communication
Our history
L’Harmattan Open Access was established in 2026 alongside L'Harmattan Publishing (Budapest), which was founded in 1999. In collaboration with L'Harmattan Publishing (Budapest) and Éditions L’Harmattan (Paris), it continues the professional work in the field of open access scholarly book publishing, as evidenced by the approximately 3,000 volumes published to date in Hungary under the L’Harmattan logo, as well as the publication of 150–170 new titles annually in recent years.
L’Harmattan Publishing (Budapest) handles traditional manuscript preparation, prepress, and print book distribution, while L’Harmattan Open Access manages digital publishing and dissemination, and Éditions L’Harmattan (Paris) handles the international distribution of print publications within the framework of this collaboration.
Digital publications form the backbone of L’Harmattan Publishing’s development. In the 2000s, the most important handbooks and databases were first published in the form of CD-ROMs, and then, starting in the 2010s, as XML-based digital publications and multimedia webbooks. The L’Harmattan Digital Database was added to the academic offerings in 2018, followed by its enhanced version, the L’Harmattan Archive, which has been operational since 2022. Here, the full content of more than 1,750 books is currently available at a high technical standard—this paved the way for today’s practice of open access scholarly book publishing.
Over the past decade, L’Harmattan has published the findings of numerous academic disciplines and interdisciplinary research areas, including, to name a few: human ecology, anthropology, psychology, history, political science, archaeology, European studies, and law. The scholarly book publishing profile of L’Harmattan Publishing and L’Harmattan Open Access includes, among others, memory studies, history, and Central European studies, social theory, philosophy and critical thinking, environmental humanities and human ecology, urban, regional and European studies, art theory, aesthetics and visual culture, minority studies, and modern art theory. The diversity of these academic fields is well illustrated by the number of Field of Science, Thema, and BISAC classifications assigned to the books.
Diamond Open Access – funding without any cost to authors
Our main focus is the publication of academic Diamond Open Access books; in other words, we strive to exempt authors and readers from publication costs. We achieve this through institutional collaboration agreements and the consortium funding opportunities offered by the Hungarian National Programme for Electronic Information Services (EISZ). Under the latter, costs may be covered in full or in part (30 per cent) by EISZ for the Hungarian partner institutions. The non-profit, low-margin publishing model and flexible budgetary models tailored to institutional needs ensure that research institutions can make Diamond Open Access publishing a strategic priority whilst facing predictable and moderate cost burdens.
Institutional collaborations and a joint book publishing strategy
The majority of academic publications are produced through co-publishing or in close collaboration with leading Hungarian and prominent European institutions. The essence of these collaborations is that institutions should think not merely in terms of publishing individual volumes, but in terms of a long-term open access book publishing strategy. This joint work may involve establishing book series, setting up editorial boards, regulating manuscript submission and peer-review processes, creating institutional collections, and consciously structuring publication workflows.
Our international partner institutions include, amongst others, the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) in Leipzig, Babeș-Bolyai University and Sapientia University in Cluj-Napoca. In Hungary, we collaborate with, amongst others, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and its Library and Information Centre, Eötvös Loránd University, Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church, and the University of Debrecen. The open-access book publishing strategy developed jointly with our partners combines elements of funding models supported by research institutions. Strategic planning of scholarly output, as well as professional and content quality control, remains in the hands of the research communities. L’Harmattan Open Access carries out tasks relating to science communication, research support, metadata management, dissemination and archiving, in consultation with partner institutions, libraries and university presses. This allows creators — authors and editors — to focus on their academic work, whilst being relieved of the costs and administrative burdens. (See all institutional Collections)
To ensure international academic visibility, L’Harmattan Open Access adopts a model based on book series that is compatible with indexing databases; this model takes into account international publication standards and the formal, technical and metadata requirements of research databases right from the planning stage of the series. This is particularly important for series that operate with an international editorial board, authors from several countries, metadata in English or multiple languages, book- and chapter-level identifiers, and a long-term publication strategy.