The Project
In spring 2021, our FID successfully began a pilot project to digitise late 20th century literature from the MENA region and make it available in open access via its MENAdoc repository. This is the first step in a new strategy to make scholarly relevant publications from our priority countries, which have so far been published in print and are only available at a few libraries in Europe, accessible to an increasingly digitally researching generation of researchers.
The Publisher
To this end, we have been working with the Turkish publishing house Isis Press since the beginning of 2021 and have begun to publish its English and French-language publications in digital form, initially from the period 1985 to 2005. The cooperation includes well-known Isis series such as Analecta Isisiana, VariaTurcica, Les cahiers du Bosphore and others. In this way, the FID makes important studies and source works on Ottoman and Turkish history, culture and society freely available for research worldwide.
Perspectives
In the future, we hope to convince other publishers in the MENA region to republish older copyright-protected but still research-relevant print publications via MENAdoc in Green Open Access. And we hope to achieve this goal in close coordination with and supported by our scholarly community.