This contribution presents the Open Encyclopedia System (OES), an infrastructure designed for innovative academic publishing in the humanities and social sciences. The open-source software, developed in close collaboration with researchers since 2020, enables them to autonomously create and maintain open-access publications, such as online encyclopaedias, lexicons, living handbooks and curated knowledge portals containing multilingual and multimodal content, in accordance with scholarly publishing standards.

Thus, OES broadens the open access publication landscape beyond online journals and monographs to include a new type of open publication. Through case studies from the humanities, history, and the social sciences, we introduce the key features of the OES software and demonstrate its potential for author-driven online publications, particularly those involving content subject to constant review, rewriting, and supplementation. OES is built on the open-source content management system WordPress, enhancing its functionality to support lemma-based academic publications.