Humanities and Social Sciences FEATURE
‘While a move towards publishing open access papers has been adopted by many STM communities for some time – with encouragement from funding bodies and governments – many HSS communities are only now having to adapt to a system whereby the author pays an article processing charge (APC) to make
their research
readily available to everyone rather than just journal subscribers.’
New OA initiatives
But things are moving forward in relation to HSS research communication, as observed by Milloy at Jisc: ‘We’re currently in a period of experimentation where publishers, institutions, libraries, research funders, learned societies and researchers are all collaborating. Together we’re exploring all kinds of ways to transition
to OA to bring forward all the best bits of the traditional model, whilst also enabling the innovation we need.
access route and in doing so, that their monograph will be treated with the same credibility.’ David Sleeman, executive publisher at Emerald Group Publishing, continued: ‘As part of a value added service to show the importance of HSS research and to increase the impact of authors work, Emerald took the decision 10 years ago to publish structured abstracts alongside each article. This assists authors by giving their manuscripts a better chance of being discovered by search engines and in turn increases usage (in terms of downloads), and therefore increases the paper’s impact. ‘Once an article has been published, Emerald is then able to measure the impact of the work and provide the author with analytical feedback to show interest from within a given community to see where they need support and which ideas should be progressed further.
www.researchinformation.info @researchinfo
‘A couple of examples include how HEFCE is working on taking forward the recommendations from the Crossick Report working with Research Councils on policies related to OA monographs and the future REFs – lots more engagement and consultation to come here. Also, the project Academic Book of the Future is being run by teams at the University College London and Kings College London, exploring key questions like “what is an academic book?” “who reads them?”, “what can technology do to help make academic books more accessible?” and “how can we make sure academic books, whether print or electronic, are kept safe, and don’t disappear?’ After listening to the needs and suggestions
from the different HSS subject communities, Emerald has made the decision to trial a zero-month embargo period for all articles submitted to Library and Information Science and selected information and knowledge management journals. This is to say that, once accepted by a journal following the peer- review process – an author’s paper will be made available via their institutions’ own repository. Emerald has also formed the Librarian Advisory Group to listen and react to that community’s concerns and suggestions. Meanwhile, the company’s publishers also work with their respective subject communities, listen to what they need and trial any further initiatives in order to find a sustainable way forward for all involved. Developing this point of new initiatives,
Eve of OLH observed: ‘A range of initiatives have emerged, often funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, that seek to implement alternative business models for open access in the humanities and social sciences. These are the important experiments, in my mind. For instance, Collabra at UC Press aims to sensitise academics to the fact that they add value through their labour at multiple points in the chain by allowing them to “pay it forward”, thereby enabling long-term economic change through information awareness.’
Eve continued: ‘Our own initiative, the OLH, funded by Mellon, seeks to pool library funds so that submission is not dependent on authors having recourse to a publication fund of their own. So far we have almost 100 libraries supporting us and seven journals scheduled to join the platform at launch. This also involves converting subscription journals to fee-free OA through our model (one of our first journals used to be subscription and
‘How do we make sure that libraries are aware that there is an open access version?’
we’re in discussion with two more for early next year).’ See RI’s May 2015 news story Open access transition easier through OLH/Jisc agreement for further information on OLH. Discussing new university presses, Eve observed: ‘An aspect that I’ve noticed, and of which I remain moderately critical, is that there seem to be a range of new university press launches on the near-horizon that take advantage of low-cost technological setups to provide open access. While the OA aspect is to be lauded, I worry that these startups often have no business model beyond article processing charges (which I do not believe have huge traction in the humanities) and that they are being coopted as brand outlets for universities to entrench their teaching positions for the next round of marketisation.’
Other HSS initiatives
Herman Pabbruwe, chief executive officer at Brill, highlights an initiative recently launched at Brill. He observed: ‘It is becoming more and more difficult for scholars to stay current on a variety of subjects, even within their own discipline. This is why we have developed Brill Research Perspectives. Designed for research communities and educators in the HSS, these
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