Ceremony Ten Years of Heidelberg University Publishing

The mission of Heidelberg University Publishing (heiUP) is to make research results freely accessible. The open access publishing house, operating on behalf of Heidelberg University, pursues the forward-looking strategy of making academic works available online without technical or legal barriers. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of heiUP, Heidelberg University Library is hosting a ceremony in the Great Hall of the Old University on 4 December 2025. That will be an occasion not only to look back over the past ten years but also to take a look at upcoming developments. Prof. Dr Thomas Maissen, an academic at Ruperto Carola’s Department of History, will give the keynote address. The event begins at 6pm.

“Heidelberg University Publishing makes excellent research visible worldwide,” underlines Dr Jochen Apel, director of Heidelberg University Library and publishing director of heiUP. Founded in 2015 on the basis of new opportunities for electronic publishing, the research-led university publisher aims consistently for global accessibility and an innovative digitization strategy with “open access” as its motto. “For Heidelberg University Publishing, we are developing new publication forms that tap into the great potential of digital publishing – for instance, through involving multimedia elements, research data and additional information in the form of annotations,” says Dr Apel. The University Library runs the open access publisher as a competence center for providing digital information at Heidelberg University.

Since releasing the first e-book ten years ago, heiUP has published more than 150 monographs, collected volumes, lecture notes and text books. In addition, eight journals and manuals appear through Heidelberg University Publishing, including leading specialist journals like “Das Mittelalter. Perspektiven mediävistischer Forschung” (The Middle Ages. Perspectives on Medieval Research). The quality of the work submitted is the main determining factor for its inclusion in the publication catalogue. Quality assurance takes place via a peer-review process where the scholarly manuscripts are examined by independent experts. The online edition is freely accessible on the publisher’s portal and available as a cost-free download. Furthermore, the publisher also offers a high-quality print version on the print-on-demand system.

The ceremony celebrating the tenth anniversary of Heidelberg University Publishing will be opened by Prof. Dr Frauke Melchior, Rector of the university. The next speaker will be Prof. Dr Ingrid Baumgärtner, who will give a welcome address. The historian from the Technical University of Darmstadt is the editor of the “Das Mittelalter” series. In his keynote address entitled “How heiUP came into my life”, Prof. Maissen will report on his experience as editor of “Pariser Historische Studien”, a series with a long tradition which heiUP has also brought out since 2020. Jochen Apel will then give a preview of future developments at the publisher.