BerlinUP is committed to ensuring the quality of its published content in terms of content, form, technology, and ethics. Besides scientific reviews by recognised experts, measures are taken to ensure good scientific practice based on established standards and recommendations for scientific publishing. Additionally, BerlinUP's scientific advisory board supports the program development and quality assurance of scientific books, book series, and journals.

BerlinUP Books

BerlinUP Books follows the quality standards for open-access books of the Working Group of University Publishers (Arbeitsgemeinschaft Universitätsverlage). The publisher meets the quality criteria of the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and OAPEN. Measures to ensure quality assurance in terms of content, form, technology, and ethics are continuously reviewed and updated.

Content

The publishing staff review submitted proposals for new publication series as well as for monographs and edited books, not belonging to a publication series and present them to the Scientific Advisory Board and the Board of Directors.

Once it is decied to include a publication in the publishing program, BerlinUP Books initiates a standardised peer review process for publications that are not included in a publication series.

To prepare the review, the reviewers follow the publisher's peer review guidelines and answer standardised questions. To ensure that the results presented in the publication can be contextualised, traced, and reproduced, BerlinUP Books supports authors in making the research data on which their publication is based accessible as open data at the time of publication, if possible.

Formal

The publisher ensures formal quality through a smooth and efficient publication process based on professional standards. The publishing staff accompanies authors and editors individually and personally through the publication process. External service providers are carefully selected. All publications are subjected to a detailed formal quality check in an internal or external editorial office. The manuscripts are checked several times for formal, typographical, and layout errors and inconsistencies.

Technical

BerlinUP Books publishes all publications online on the Technische Universität Berlin's repository for research data and publications. The publication is in PDF/A format, which is suitable for long-term archiving. The file contains bookmarks and complete entries for the document properties (author, title, license information, etc.). Each publication is assigned a DOI as a persistent identifier. For selected anthologies, the DOI is assigned at the contribution level.

Ethical

BerlinUP Books provides a noncommercial publishing opportunity that abides by the tenets and regulations of the Guidelines for Safeguarding Good Scientific Practice of the participating institutions, the German Research Foundation (DFG) Code, and the COPE Core Practices. Our editorial independence ensures that authors, editors, or peer reviewers will not be discriminated against due to their personal characteristics or identity. Any legal or ethical concerns are taken seriously and will be investigated.

BerlinUP Journals

BerlinUP Journals adheres to the quality checklist for open-access journals from the open-access.network as well as the quality criteria of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

For journal editors, BerlinUP Journals provides organisational frameworks and technical infrastructure. For this purpose, the open-source software Open Journal Systems (OJS) is used and continuously maintained and developed. We guarantee compliance with technical standards (e.g., persistent identifiers, metadata, interfaces, and long-term archiving) as well as compliance with transparency principles (e.g., information on goal and scope, editorial board, guidelines for authors, review process, and copyright and licensing conditions).

The responsibility for the scientific review process (e.g., peer review, editorial review) as well as for typesetting, proofreading, and editing of the article submissions lies with the respective journal editors or editorial boards. BerlinUP Journals offers support and advice.

On the principles for safeguarding good scientific practice:

• Freie Universität Berlin: Statute for Safeguarding Good Scientific Practice
• Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin: Statutes of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin for Safeguarding Good Scientific Practice and for Dealing with Allegations of Scientific Misconduct [only available in German]
• Technische Universität Berlin: Statute on the Safeguarding of Good Academic Practice
• Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin: Statute Ensuring Good Scientific Practice