About

General Information

The Encyclopedia of the History of Science (ETHOS) publishes up-to-date, peer-reviewed articles on topics in the history of science and technology, broadly construed. All articles focus on a single topic in the field, presenting an interpretive overview of the subject while also surveying relevant published literature.

Most articles are solicited by members of the Editorial and Advisory Boards. Unsolicited articles by qualified authors are welcome in certain circumstances, however, as are suggestions for future articles. Updates to articles are planned on a timely basis to account for new scholarship, as well as to correct errors of fact and interpretation. The entire Encyclopedia is archived quarterly to create a stable, citable page for each entry. Readers can consult both current and previous versions of published articles.

The Encyclopedia of the History of Science is published and hosted by the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries Publishing Service (ISSN 2642-5890). Unless otherwise noted, all images courtesy of the Carnegie Mellon University Archives.

We gratefully acknowledge the support of a Mellon Seed Grant in Digital Humanities through Carnegie Mellon's Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences; as well as The Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University for support of an editorial workshop. Thanks also to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and particularly Ed Zalta, Uri Nodelman, and Colin Allen for initial design support. ETHOS thanks Jonathan Kiritharan of CMU Libraries for ongoing programming support; and Matthew Lincoln, Drew Stimson, Scott Weingart, Dan Evans, and Heidi Wiren Bartlett for initial design and deployment support. ETHOS uses the Janeway Platform developed at the Birkbeck (University of London) Centre for Technology and Publishing. The theme for ETHOS was implemented by Patrick Fulton.

Copyright and Licensing Status

Authors retain their copyright. However, they must agree to publish under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License as well as license their article to the Encyclopedia of the History of Science as outlined in the Author Agreement.

Open Access and Fees Status

ETHOS does not charge authors a submission charge or a publication fee. Likewise, readers are not charged a fee to access articles online. The Encyclopedia has been designed so that each entry (even archived or corrected entries) is available online indefinitely without cost or paywall.

Archival Policy

The entire Encyclopedia will normally be archived four times a year, ensuring that stable entries can be cited and that revisions to articles can be tracked over time.

Peer Review Status

All contributed articles are reviewed (and must be approved) by at least two members of the Editorial or Advisory Boards, or by one member of these Boards and an outside expert selected by the Editorial Board. Most articles are solicited by members of the Editorial Board, however, ETHOS does accept unsolicited submissions by qualified authors, by which we mean those with a Ph.D. in history or a relevant discipline for the topic, and who have published refereed works on the proposed topic in respected peer-review journals or books. Members of the Editorial and Advisory Boards have the final say in the determination of who may constitute a qualified author.

Publication Frequency

Articles are published on an ongoing basis but are normally archived four times a year, creating stable “issues” of the Encyclopedia that can be reliably cited even if later revisions are made to articles.