In 2008, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, together with international partners, initiated a new Funding Programme supposed to help finding the best and most practicable ways of transferring existing scholarly journals from print to web. Connotations, which has been online since the mid-1990s, applied for funding in an initiative to develop its web-presence and expand it to create a complete online archive of the published issues. In addition, the World Wide Web had already proven to be an ideal platform for Connotations and its concept of continuously publishing articles and responses in ongoing critical debates. Since these debates usually spread over several issues of the printed journal, only the internet will provide immediate access to parts of debates which occur after the publication of an article. With a website for each debate, articles later published can easily be added and linked to their predecessors and the whole debate.

Under the heading of “Knowledge-Exchange”, first steps and results of the different journals having been awarded a grant for this transition process were presented and collected during a workshop in Bonn in May 2009. The presentations, intermediate reports and first results can be accessed at the website of Knowledge Exchange, an international collaboration of research foundations from Denmark, Germany, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.