Information services provider Atypon Systems, Inc., US, and academic publisher Walter de Gruyter, Germany, have announced the release of Reference Global, a new integrated online journals, books and reference work site for de Gruyter scholarly content. The platform can be accessed at www.reference-global.com and www.degruyter-online.com, and users can choose between English and German language interfaces.
Research and development throughout 2007 and early 2008 saw a major redesign of Literatum, the Atypon platform that supports the e-publishing sites of all Atypon clients. An extensive engineering programme is projected to have expanded the capabilities of Literatum into a truly multi product platform that handles books, reference works and other content types in an integrated and flexible way.
All of de Gruyter's journals are available on the new platform - including journals from the K.G. Saur and Max Niemeyer imprints which have not previously been available online. In addition, at launch, Reference Global hosts the complete Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Sciences (HSK) series, and an initial selection of monographs from 2007 and 2008. Around 400 e-books will be added to the platform each year and the number of bibliographical reference works is also set to grow. Individual book chapters as well as journal articles can be downloaded as PDFs.
Walter de Gruyter has been publishing books and journals in the fields of humanities, medicine, natural sciences and law for over 250 years. In 2006, it acquired K.G. Saur and Max Niemeyer, thereby forming one of the largest academic publishers in Europe. De Gruyter now publishes more than 500 new books each year, almost half of which are in English, along with over 90 journals and a variety of additional online products.
