kassel university press

The services of kassel university press are primarily available to the academic staff of the University of Kassel as authors and/or editors. In addition, kup can work for the university's central institutions and the university administration.

Titles are always published as freely available Open Access publications at kassel university press. If nothing different has been agreed, the electronic edition will be made available to the public under the Creative Commons License CC BY SA 4.0 (Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 under the same conditions). Alongside the online version a printed version can be published, but charges are incurred for this. This is made available via a print-on-demand service provider and can then be purchased through a book shop.

The publishing services cover:

• Advice in drawing up an ideal publication strategy and organising the process of assessing the content for the publication.
• The formal checks on incoming manuscripts, processing the author’s PDF file for publication and organising the production of the physical media (e.g. printing).
• The Open Access publication of the works and long-term archiving, reporting the publication to the German National Library and including it in the Verzeichnis Lieferbarer Bücher. Printed works are available  for at least five years and electronic versions for at least 15 years.

• Forwarding it to aggregators (e.g. WorldCat, OAPEN, DOAB), supplying the stationary and Online book trade.

Third-party services providers are arranged for any services that go beyond these (e.g. proof-reading, formatting, editing, language editing, translation, special cover designs), if necessary; these services are agreed with the users and charged for separately.

Please note that we can only offer a limited range of bindings, types of paper and cover versions because we are a small university publishing service. Our products are printed digitally and there is a quality difference between this and classic offset printing.

The kassel university press practises an author-friendly rights policy. The authors grant:

• the simple, unlimited usage right to duplicate and circulate the work in printed form as a book
• the simple, unlimited usage right to make available the publication online free of charge

• the right to circulate the meta-data as evidence of the publication in relevant bibliographical databases under the CCO licence (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/).

The copyright of the work remains with the author. The author’s right to publish the work in some other way is not affected by transferring the simple, i.e. non-exclusive usage right to the University of Kassel.

If you are interested in a publication project, an individual quotation is drawn up. This normally contains a general publication fee and the printing costs (print-on-demand).

Note: You can also use our costing tool to query the costs yourself at any time, providing the relevant information.

• The general publication fee covers simple typesetting checks, processing the work for online availability and the POD print (including a standard cover) for the work, registering the work at relevant service providers (VLB, OAPEN, DOAB etc.), allocating an ISBN and DOI and organising the legal deposit (German National Library, Hesse, the Thesis Office, if necessary).
• The graphic fee (currently 50,- € net) initially covers the simple adaptation of an existing cover. The fee increases, for example, for subsequent corrections (+ 30,- €) or if the cover contains pictures (+ 30,- €). For completely customised covers, the invoice from our external graphic designers is charged to the authors.
• The author is responsible for the printing costs. In addition to the copies that the author requires, the following must be paid for: 
  • author’s copies for personal use
  • 2 compulsory copies to the German National Library
  • 2 copies for the Library
  • For theses: depending on the applicable doctoral regulations, up to six additional deposit copies may be required. Since the doctoral regulations of 2021, printed copies are no longer required for kup publications due to the provision via KOBRA.
• Outside services can be arranged for other services like professional typesetting, a specific layout, an individual cover design, proofreading, copy editing, translation etc., on request.

Authors must provide kup with a printable PDF file. The following formal specifications must be followed:

You have normally formatted your file in the DIN A4 layout. Even if the final format of the book is to be smaller, you can hand in the file with the DIN A4 layout. Its size is then reduced in the printing shop. If this is the case, please note that the Font size, tables and figures are large enough so that they can still be read after their size has been reduced. 

• The text must be supplied as a PDF file. Convert your file into press quality. The fonts used should be included in the PDF file as far as possible. Not all programmes for preparing PDF files can do this and you need to set the correct option for this first. In exceptional cases, we will also accept Word files. However, they require extensive reworking and this must be agreed in advance.
• Please take the following into account when numbering pages: the first pages (title page and legal notice) are prepared by kup. In the case of a monograph, your text starts on page 3 – and on page 5 for series publications.
• Set up the page numbers for double-sided printing. If the page numbers are at the outsides, then they must be on the left outside for left-hand (even) pages and on the right-hand outside for right (odd) pages. Or you can have the page numbers centred as an alternative.
• Continuous text is formatted as fully justified. The fully justified text often creates unattractive gaps. Please add hyphens to your text, if this is the case. Ideally, you should use soft hyphens (key combination: control and minus sign).­
• The line spacing should not be single line and not 1.5 either because of legibility, otherwise the text will look like a draft version. Cf. detailed recommendations below.
• In the case of graphics, please note that the lines are not too faint. They may be eroded in printing, as the text is screened. The same applies to fonts, particularly with texts that are prepared using LaTeX. Images should have a minimum resolution of 300 dpi, graphics 600 dpi. Make sure that you have distinguishable colours, in the shades of grey too.
• Please consider the copyright for any graphics and illustrations that you use, as kup cannot assume any liability here.
• Guidelines for drawing up fully accessible documents at the University of Kassel (German only)
• Detailed version of the format specifications (German only)