Dis-counting Open Access in the Humanities - Issuu

"Consider keystone species in the scholarly communication ecosystem like “The Book.” Even when OA outputs come in traditional forms, our systems fail to recognize them, especially if the languages and publishing houses authors use are unfamiliar. While only 5% and 10% of the books published by U.S. and UK university presses are open access, it is unsafe to assume that this low percentage extends to the ca. 86,000 monographs published annually (Grimme et al. 2019, Shaw, Phillips, and Gutiérrez, 2023)....

When AHSS scholars publish in OA journals (the “Journal” is another keystone species), information professionals again discount their work. A December 2023 catalog search reveals that Scopus identifies only 18% (2,000) of its indexed HSS journals as OA. That number is hardly representative. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) shows over five times more high-quality OA journals in AHSS (11,000), publishing in over 80 languages. Reflecting on the importance of a global perspective, Mark Huskisson recently described the wealth of OA research published on the Public Knowledge Project’s OJS platform. PKP data suggests at least 20,000 active OA journals in HSS. OJS platforms host the majority of diamond open-access journals, publishing research in 60 languages from more than 146 countries (Huskisson 2023, Public Knowledge Project 2022)....

So what can information professionals do to make AHSS OA outputs “count”? How can we dispel the belief that humanities disciplines are slow to adopt open practices and outputs? What should we do to show the funders who care about openness that most AHSS scholars are not laggards or reactionaries but may indeed be using the affordances of digital, open dissemination more fully and authentically than many of their STEM colleagues, stuck as the latter are in economic and political structures that often reward secrecy and competition? A number of community leaders are showing the way...."