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Melusina is a hybrid, multimodal open access publishing initiative run by the Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences (FHSE) at the University of Luxembourg. Its principal aim is to significantly enhance researchers’ opportunities to make full use of digital technologies in scholarly publishing. It also responds to a long-standing demand for digital publishing services capable of overcoming the limitations researchers have experienced with earlier publishing efforts. Finally, it aligns with the faculty’s interest in making its research visible in a consolidated, transparent way—one that is closely connected to ongoing research activities and responsive to the needs of its scholars.

Melusina is a hybrid publishing initiative. It supports established forms of scholarly publishing while remaining open to the innovative formats that have emerged over the past 25 years. We strongly believe that the challenges posed by digital technologies will not lead to a simple replacement of traditional forms, but rather to a variety of productive entanglements between old and new within a transforming scholarly publishing ecology. Consequently, Melusina supports online, print, and raw-data-like versions of publications simultaneously. Moreover, Melusina is not limited to the online platform where publications are showcased and accessed. It brings together a range of relevant services and environments, some of which already existed—such as the University’s code repository for data-driven publications. In doing so, it creates a relational infrastructure that values well-functioning environments and adds services where they appear meaningful.

Melusina is a multimodal publishing initiative. The past 25 years have shown that digital technologies do not simply introduce new types of publications; they diversify the structures and practices through which research is communicated. Beyond monographs, essays, or proceedings, Melusina therefore also supports formats such as data papers, multimedia narratives, living handbooks, and video essays—whenever these forms prove useful and sustainable.

Melusina is an open access publishing initiative. In line with the University’s commitment to the Open Access movement, Melusina’s institutional support and embeddedness enable the use of digital technologies in ways that benefit authors, readers, and institutions alike. Recent research has shown, however, that openness does not automatically create value, and much of the recent momentum in open access has been driven by market concerns and shaped by publishing cultures in the sciences. Yet not all publishing cultures operate in the same way. Melusina is committed to contributing to the development of open access publishing models for the Humanities and Social Sciences—disciplines that have historically played a smaller role in the open access movement. With this in mind, the Melusina team feels particularly aligned with the principles of diamond open access, which aims to break with common models that merely shift the financial burden of publishing from readers to authors.

Finally, Melusina is founded on the belief that digital publishing has so far paid too little attention to the social and cultural dimensions of scholarly communication. Scholarly publishing is a socio-cultural ecosystem; therefore, technological innovation and the imagined benefits of new publishing forms alone cannot sustainably transform it. Persistent concerns about the volatility and finitude of digital publications testify to this. Consequently, Melusina invests considerable energy in developing and contributing to new social norms around the transparency of emerging publishing processes, the quality assessment of new publication types, citability, and the relationship between scientific discourse and publishing practices under changing conditions. Our primary goal is to create value for researchers who publish with Melusina, for those who engage with its publications, and for the scientific community as a whole.