OpenEdition is not a conventional publisher - it is France's national open-access infrastructure for the humanities and social sciences (HSS). It hosts around 675 scholarly journals on OpenEdition Journals, more than 13,000 books on OpenEdition Books, over 5,000 research blogs on Hypothèses, and tens of thousands of academic event announcements on Calenda. The journals themselves are edited and owned by university presses, learned societies, and research centers; OpenEdition provides the publishing platform, dissemination, and the economic model that keeps everything free for authors.

The project began in 1999 when historian Marin Dacos launched Revues.org with two journals. It grew into a CNRS service unit (Cléo, 2007), was recognized as a French national research infrastructure in 2016, and rebranded as OpenEdition in 2018, when Revues.org became OpenEdition Journals. Today the OpenEdition Center (UAR 2504) in Marseille is jointly operated by CNRS, Aix-Marseille Université, EHESS, and Avignon Université. This guide covers how the four platforms fit together, what the Freemium open-access model means for you as an author or reader, and how submission actually works.

OpenEdition's signature economic model is Freemium: the full text of articles is open to every reader in HTML, while premium reader formats (PDF and ePub downloads, DRM-free and unlimited) are reserved for users at partner libraries that subscribe to the program. Subscription revenue is reinvested in developing open access - it funds the platform rather than paywalling research.

Many hosted journals go further and operate as Diamond OA: entirely free for both authors and readers in all formats, financed by universities, the CNRS, and other public institutions. Licensing varies by journal; Creative Commons licenses such as CC BY and CC BY-NC-SA are common, so check the individual journal's policy page for reuse terms.

Because there are no author-facing charges, fee-waiver programs are unnecessary - a notable contrast with APC-based open-access publishers.

OpenEdition is a hosting platform, so peer review is run by each journal's own editorial board, not centrally. Most hosted titles are established scholarly journals using single- or double-anonymized review following the conventions of their discipline and country; turnaround times vary widely. Check the journal's own "instructions to authors" page (linked from its OpenEdition site) for its review model, and treat each title as you would any independent journal when assessing fit and rigor.

1. Find the right journal. Browse the OpenEdition Journals catalog by discipline or search SciSpace for hosted titles like Terrain, L'Homme, or Cybergeo.
2. Read the journal's author guidelines. Language policy (many accept French and English; some Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese), word limits, and citation style (Chicago, APA, or French conventions) differ per title.
3. Submit directly to the editorial team. There is no central OpenEdition submission system - most journals take submissions by email or through their own editorial platform.
4. Review and production. After acceptance, the journal's team prepares your article in Lodel, OpenEdition's open-source publishing software, for HTML-first publication.

Articles on OpenEdition Journals carry stable URLs and, increasingly, DOIs; cite them as you would any journal article, adding the DOI or URL for electronic-only titles. Editorial ethics are handled by each journal's board within the framework of French public research integrity rules, and the platform supports COPE-aligned practice. Indexing varies by title - many journals appear in DOAJ, and a number are covered by Scopus or Web of Science - so verify the specific journal's indexing before submission if it matters for your evaluation requirements.