Profile

H-Soz-Kult is an moderated information and communication platform for historians which publishes academic news and publications. Since its founding in 1996, the operators of the platform have adhered to the motto “from academics – for academics – by academics” and are committed to the principles of open-access and community network. Its central editorial office is located at the History Department of the Humboldt University of Berlin. H-Soz-Kult has developed into a significant provider and distributor of information for historians in the German-speaking area.

Current articles from the academic world can be accessed via H-Soz-Kult’s website, email and RSS-feeds. Having registered with H-Soz-Kult, participants can order subscriptions for various editorial sections or can publish relevant informations. H-Soz-Kult is read by about 30,000 email subscribers, in particular at all institutes of historical science in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The editorial range has been augmented with contributions from the complementary forums Connections and Contemporary-History-Online since 2004.

H-Soz-Kult is a part of Clio-online’s services and is mainly funded by the Humboldt-University in Berlin. H-Soz-Kult is also a partner in a wide range of other academic projects, and was supported by the German Research Foundation for many years.

Editorial Department

H-Soz-Kult’s main editorial office at the Humboldt University of Berlin is always active. Its voluntary editorial staff consists of over 40 people from almost all fields of historical science. H-Soz-Kult’s editors vouch for the selection of the news, guarantee the compliance with quality standards, and process and archive the published articles on the web. The predominantly voluntary editorial team publishes around 1,000 reviews of relevant publications annually. Additionally, more than 500 reports on historians’ conferences, literature reviews, articles, and contributions about ongoing academic events, more than 2,000 announcements of upcoming scientific events, the current tables of contents of more than 500 periodicals from historical science, and more than 1,000 advertisements for jobs or scholarships as well as information concerning university courses are published.

H-Soz-Kult is supported by an academic advisory council which is committed to the project and contributes specialised knowledge. H-Soz-Kult's editors accompany reviews, literature reports and discussion series from the inception and the selection of topics, books, and authors, through the comprehensive editorial review process, to the texts' publication. The number and institutional diversity of our editors ensure, along with our quality standards, that every text published by H-Soz-Kult has gone through a diligent and competent editorial (and sometimes additional external) peer review process that adheres to standards of good academic practice.

For further information on the H-Soz-Kult editorial team see the page "editorial team".

Advisory Group

With H-Soz-Kult‘s internal advisory group, a working group comes together regularly whose members are chosen among the editors of H-Soz-Kult. Their task is to discuss questions of strategic development of our services, critically evaluate the services and any problems that might occur, and advise the coordinators. Members of the advisory group currently are Katja Castryck-Naumann, Christoph Classen, Jürgen Dinkel, Maria Framke, Lioba Geis, Debora Gerstenberger, Stefan Gorißen, Rüdiger Hohls, Torsten Kahlert, Jan-Holger Kirsch, Thoralf Klein, Fabian Knopf, Alexander Korb, Karsten Malowitz, Daniel Menning, Kai Nowak, Sabine Stach, Thomas Werneke, Heike Wieters.

Audience / Circulation

The continuously growing amount of email subscribers to H-Soz-Kult is testament to the large affinity of the audience to the specific academic information available. The majority of all professional historians of all individual fields of historical science in the German-speaking area, and over 50 other countries, receive H-Soz-Kult via email, the website and increasingly via RSS-feed or Twitter. The readership is, increasingly, also comprised by students, employees of archives, libraries and museums, and journalists.

All H-Soz-Kult articles can be easily researched and accessed online. Due to its wide range of information, H-Soz-Kult’s website is an intensively used online resource for historical research. Now, up to one million page views by up to 250,000 unique visitors from more than 100 countries are registered per month on the website. For further information on H-Soz-Kult’s circulation see the page media data.

Frequency of Publication

H-Soz-Kult publishes up to 20 contributions in various sections per day, six days a week. The majority of them are emailed to subscribers and focus on reviews, announcements and reports on scientific events. Increasingly, tables of content from academic periodicals as well as advertisements for jobs and scholarships are received. For further information regarding publishing at H-Soz-Kult see the section on submission of articles.

Subscriptions / Personalisation

H-Soz-Kult articles can be provided as email subscriptions via two routes. Only the registration of the email address is required for the submission of articles.

By using the „My Clio“ service of the Clio-online portal you can subscribe to a selection of articles from H-Soz-Kult, Contemporary-History-Online and Connections. ‘My Clio’s’ convenient web user-interface also provides options to control the sending and forwarding of personal information. Additionally, participants can publish their academic vita as a personal entry on Clio-online’s list of researchers.

Clio-online also provides additional services for H-Soz-Kult. The search engine „‘historical reviews online’ (HRO)“ grants access to various other online historical reviews. It includes the latest online academic reviews, which are available as full texts with no access restrictions. Via further links, reviewed new releases can be researched in other databases and catalogues.

Networking

H-Soz-Kult is a part of Clio-online whose development and extension was predominantly funded by the German Research Foundation. The registered association Clio-online – Gateway for Historical Scholarship e.V., which was founded by renowned providers of academic information, became the funding organisation at the end of 2007. Since then, the costs for the technological services and the core editorial team have been carried mainly by the Humboldt University of Berlin. Further editorial teams are located at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam (Contemporary-History-Online) and at the University of Leipzig (Connections).

Clio-online bundles internet offers for historians, develops new concepts for conveying specialised information and also provides a technological infrastructure that supports a more intensive usage of the internet in historical science. For further information see the Clio-online portal.

In addition, H-Soz-Kult since 2003 also participates in H-Net (Humanities & Social Sciences Online), an international association of researchers from the humanities and the social sciences in America. H-Soz-Kult’s cryptic name is derived from the connection with H-Net - the acronym stands for ‘Humanities – Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte’ (Humanities – Social and Cultural History). In a joint effort, new opportunities to use information technologies for improving the free and international exchange of academic ideas and resources are being developed. Thus, H-Soz-Kult endeavours to further develop and extend a wide-ranging offer of independent, peer-review-based information and communication services for historical science.

Contact us

H-Soz-Kult-Zentralredaktion
c/o Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Philosophische Fakultät I
Institut für Geschichtswissenschaften
Sitz: Friedrichstrasse 191-193
D-10099 Berlin

Tel.: ++49-(0)30/2093-70602,-70605

Fax: ++49 (0)30-2093-70656

E-Mail: hsk.redaktion@geschichte.hu-berlin.de

As of May 2018