Scientific handbooks are typically weighty and expensive volumes which quickly go out of date due to the rapid developments seen in many scientific disciplines. In addition, the authors of these handbooks generally have to sign over the rights to their work to their publisher. ZB MED hopes that the Living Handbooks pilot project will help remedy this situation. The platform enables handbooks from various life science disciplines to be published online and made freely accessible to everyone – and it enables the authors who collaborated on the handbook to retain all the rights to their work. Another advantage over printed textbooks is that the contents can be kept up-to-date by modifying the textbooks chapter by chapter whenever the authors feel this is necessary. Living Handbooks also caters to a wider range of media, allowing the publication not only of text, but also of pictures, graphics and videos.

"All the works included on our Living Handbooks platform are quality-assured because every version passes through a peer review process," explains Ulrich Korwitz, Director of ZB MED. This peer review process is supervised and safeguarded by an editorial board from the relevant subject area. All the contributions are also carefully checked and proofread. Persistent identifiers such as DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) are used to ensure that the content remains citable and accessible at all times.

The first "Living Handbook" was developed in a collaboration with Dr. Richarda Böttcher from the organisation Handchirurgie Weltweit e.V. The first parts of the "Living Textbook of Hand Surgery" are already available online. ZB MED will be developing the next Living Handbook in collaboration with the European Association of Urology (EAU). Additional handbooks from a range of life science disciplines are already at the planning stage.

Check out the Living Handbooks platform: www.gms-books.de

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