Open Access
to debate
Open
The humanities and social sciences have been reluctant to adopt open-access publishing, but change is afoot,
reports Rebecca Pool
In Spring 2009, a tense debate took place at the University of Maryland, USA that painfully highlighted the chasm between science, technical and medical disciplines, and the social sciences and humanities. A senate committee from the university had proposed a resolution that called for faculty members to publish research in free, online databases. At a time when open-access (OA) publishing had been widely accepted in academic institutions across the world, votes were cast 37 against the motion and 24 in favour. Student newspaper The Diamondback Online reported a ‘face off’ between science and humanities academics with one history professor saying: ‘Open access applies well to some disciplines and hurts others.’ While not every academic in the humanities and social sciences will support
12 Research Information April/May 2010
this sentiment, many may sympathise. From the beginning, OA has moved slowly in these sectors compared to its support in science, technology and medicine (STM). Biomedical scientists were particularly
quick to embrace the new breed of journals that were digital, online, free of charge and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions, while OA archiving rocketed amongst physicists. This reflects attitudes to online information itself; a survey by the Research Information Network in 2007 revealed that only one fifth of researchers in the life sciences and physical sciences rated print versions of current journal issues as very useful for their research. In the arts and humanities the figure was three fifths. These stark contrasts in attitudes are
partly due to the different ways in which the research sectors are funded. Unlike STM disciplines, much research in the humanities
and social sciences is produced by individual researchers without the support of a specific project grant. Instead, many of these academics derive relatively small amounts of funding from their institution’s block grant based on the results of a research assessment exercise. While these funds provide the humanity
and social science academic with the time and resources to carry out research, they rarely cover publication costs. This limits the scope for them to publish in OA journals funded through publication fees. It could also explain why there is no humanities or social sciences equivalent to PubMed Central or the Public Library of Science, both with a strong focus on the OA publishing of relatively well-funded medical research. Governments also tend to plough
more funds into the STM disciplines. Consequently, the well-established tax- payer argument for OA, which states that tax payers shouldn’t have to pay a second fee to find out about tax-payer-funded research, carries more clout in STM. And the simple fact that more people demand free and easy access to research into cancer, say, than they
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