In continuation of a long tradition. A brief history of the journals of the Hamburg Natural History Museum

Not only the natural history collections in Hamburg, but also the museum’s journals look back at a long tradition. The journal was established as annual report given by its first full-time director Alexander Pagenstecher on the activities of the Naturhistorisches Museum in Hamburg, starting with its first volume in the year 1884. Being at that time part of the “Jahrbuch der Hamburgischen Wissenschaftlichen Anstalten”, i.e. the annual report of all research institutes of the city state of Hamburg, it was in 1894 re-named “Mitteilungen aus dem Naturhistorischen Museum in Hamburg”, only settling in gradually during the second decade of its existence on this long used title. An overview is given for the changing titles of the total of 106 volumes published in 126 years, correlated to and mirroring in some way the fate of the museum collections, until this long tradition terminated in the year 2010. Five years later also a second journal founded at the Zoological Museum in 1952, viz. the „Entomologische Mitteilungen aus dem Zoologischen Museum Hamburg“, terminated its publication. Fusing these two former “Mitteilungen”, the journal “Evolutionary Systematics” is launched now at the Center of Natural History, itself founded in October 2014 at the Universität Hamburg, as a renewed and modern scientific online journal with open access, aiming for the next generation of publications on collection-based research also from other museum and university collections, as well as from a wide range of scientific areas devoted to whole-organism biology.