'Living Reviews' is a unique editorial concept for the publication of high-quality scientific content. Living Reviews journals are publishing 'living' review articles. What does this mean?
'Living' review articles are
Please refer to the "Scope & Concept" documents for Living Reviews in Relativity, Living Reviews in Solar Physics, Living Reviews in European Governance, Living Reviews in Landscape Research, or Living Reviews in Democracy, for further details on journal philosophy, editorial concept and policies. You may also want to browse our Media Coverage section for a list of papers featuring Living Reviews.
The concept of a 'living' review is originated by Bernard F. Schutz and Jennifer Wheary, who started the first journal, Living Reviews in Relativity, in 1998 at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics. Living Reviews® is a registered trademark of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft.
Living Reviews journals go beyond the electronic dissemination of traditional print articles. All articles are readable online in HTML, integrated in a highly functional hypertext viewing environment. Sophisticated navigation support is offered for equations, figures, footnotes and references. Articles may include an unlimited number of colorful images, tables, movies, animations, or even program code and raw data. Additionally, all references cited in Living Reviews articles are collated in online searchable literature databases, with the database entries linked back to and put into context by the annotation within the respective review articles. References can be exported in various formats and harvested for other web based information systems.
Please refer to the document Using Living Reviews (in the Living Reviews in Relativity web space) to learn more about the electronic design.
Living Reviews journals are being published by scientific institutions. Living Reviews in Relativity is being published by the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, Potsdam (Golm). Living Reviews in Solar Physics is being published by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau. Living Reviews in European Governance is being published by the ECSA, Vienna. Living Reviews in Landscape Research is being published by the Leibniz-Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research, Müncheberg. Living Reviews in Democracy is being published by the NCCR Democracy, Zurich.
Central services for journal publication are provided. From 2002 to 2008, the Living Reviews were supported by the Heinz Nixdorf Foundation as part of the Center for Information Management in the Max Planck Society (ZIM), since 2007 Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL).
For all Living Reviews journals central publication infrastructure is available. All publication software is open source and can be used for non-commercial purposes without licensing fees. Additionally, editorial services for journals affiliated to Max Planck Institutes are provided.
We believe that the Living Reviews concept yields benefits for many research areas, where scientists have to master and overview a wide range of subject fields and heavily rely on comprehensive and current review literature. We are happy to share our experiences and software developments with the scientific community. We invite other research communities to evaluate the concept, its benefits, and its applicability to their field. Please, contact us at to learn more about the publishing project, the infrastructure behind and the services we can offer.
To create multi-functional online versions of scientific papers, one may use the publication builder component of our software. It processes articles written in LaTeX with bibliographies prepared in BibTeX and produces an advanced web presentation. For further details please visit the ePublishing Toolkit pages.
We very much welcome your feedback, questions, and suggestions. Please, contact us at the following address:
Living Reviews
Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics
(Albert Einstein Institute)
Am Mühlenberg 1
14476
Potsdam
Germany
phone: +49 (0) 331 567 7115
e-mail: