Copernicus is a publisher of high quality literature in science and fine arts since 1990. Copernicus is specialized in serving scientific associations in publishing and distributing their books and journals, but it also publishes and distributes its own literature. Copernicus plays a leading role in the areas of online, of public peer-reviewed and of open access publications.

Objectives

The publication strategy of Copernicus includes:

• Maximum flexibility regarding the type and the medium of publication
• Maximum attention with respect to the scientific and technical quality of a publication
• Maximum visibility and impact for all publications
• Maximum flexibility concerning the peer-review process (anonymous, eponymous and public review) and copyright agreements (incl. personalized copyright)

Means of achieving these objectives

• produce all types of publications, such as journals and books etc.
• use all media for publication, such as printing media, WWW, CD-ROM etc.
• apply rigorous but fair peer-review to scientific manuscripts assisted by an effective Editorial Support Office to keep review times short and costs low
• use open access software for the most cost-effective and highest-quality composing, editing and formatting of articles
• apply professional copy-editing, where necessary
• process figures, movies and sound tracks with state-of-the-art software
• select the print-on-demand technology to reduce costs, to make back issues available at any time, to print colour illustrations at no extra charge for authors, and to provide free offprint files to authors
• provide immediate and eventually free web access to all articles, articles to be indexed by an ever increasing number of search services, and the most liberal copyright agreement for the free reproduction for non-commercial scientific purposes
• provide immediate and full article alert service about any new publication to all alert-subscribers (free of charge)
• take full advantage of emerging text-searching and data-mining techniques to exploit the full set of online publications
• use the online server-assisted cross-reference technology to interlink the references (of electronic publications with their currently valid online addresses)
• guarantee permanent online accessibility through "mirroring" clusters of web-servers located at different secure sites and sophisticated backup facilities

And run all operations on a not-for-profit basis and by assistance of the electronic Copernicus Support Services for rigorous reduction of production costs and online assistance in editorial and production matters.