University teaching and research have been closely connected with publishing since the late Middle Ages, when students purchased or copied lecture notes themselves to help them follow lectures more easily. In this context, the medieval history of the book is divided into monastic and secular periods, with the consolidation of universities marking the dividing line between them. Gutenberg’s invention of movable-type printing therefore encountered an already well-developed tradition of university publishing. However, the opportunities it provided, particularly the new geography of the book, which enabled affordable and identical printed copies of scholarly works to circulate throughout Europe and thus allowed scholars, for the first time, to compare and build upon one another’s findings, resulted in a different and more efficient form of scholarly communication and ultimately in the scientific revolution characteristic of the early modern period. Today, scholarly communication is still primarily based on publishing products such as scholarly monographs, journals, and databases of research papers, while publishers operating in this field rank among the leaders of the publishing industry according to numerous indicators.
The relationship between universities and publishing was no different in Osijek, where books connected with academic work have been printed since the 18th century. The predecessors of today’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Teacher Training Academy and the Faculty of Education, occasionally published their own editions, while following the establishment of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, publishing became a regular and systematically organised activity accompanying teaching and research. Philological studies, which initially predominated, were soon joined by publications in the fields of history, pedagogy, philosophy, psychology, information sciences, and other disciplines.
Today, the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences publishes between 10 and 20 new monographic publications annually, as well as conference proceedings, some of which, such as Krleža’s Days in Osijek, have been published continuously for more than 30 years, scholarly journals indexed in renowned databases including WoS and Scopus, and numerous student and commemorative publications.
Since 2023, the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences has been developing the FFOS e-Publishing project with the aim of providing open access to the full texts of university textbooks, scholarly monographs, and conference proceedings published over 35 years of publishing activity. E-Publishing reflects the Faculty’s commitment to the principles of open access and open science, as the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Osijek, as a public higher education institution and publisher, considers it its responsibility to make the results of its work available to the general public and to continuously strive to increase the visibility of the research conducted by its employees and authors.