Review Platform for European History

recensio.net is a Europe-wide, multilingual platform for reviews of historical literature. The conception and implementation of recensio.net – by means of a collaborative project of the Bavarian State Library (BSB) in Munich, the German Historical Institute Paris (DHIP) and the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG) – was funded by the German Research Foundation (2010–2014).

recensio.net is committed to the principles of Open Access. All content is permanently accessible for free. Reviews focus on work published in Europe and featuring European topics (regional and supra-regional). The platform's navigational languages are English, German and French. Reviews may be written in any European language.

Journals can increase the visibility of their review sections by publishing them online on recensio.net – either "exclusively" online or in a "hybrid" form as part of a pre- or post-print process. It is irrelevant whether the reviews are already accessible online or available in print. recensio.net does not claim exclusivity for its content, but wants to allow journals to reach a maximum degree of visibility and provide users with a central starting point when searching for reviews of academic literature by bringing together reviews which are scattered and often go practically unnoticed.
The editorial teams of cooperating journals continue to work independently. The review sections can be individually accessed on recensio.net, or a full-text search can be performed on them (together with reviews from other cooperating journals). This is possible because each review is tagged with substantial metadata (subject headings, classification information regarding time, region and topic of the title reviewed), making it easier for users to find it and allowing them to search the entire platform for specific topics. Each review is available in full text and can be directly downloaded from recensio.net. The Bavarian State Library has undertaken to enhance the reviews with metadata, to link them to the library catalogue (OPAC) of the Bavarian Library Network (to the respective books reviewed), and to provide long-term archival storage.