Impact of Social Sciences – Publishers respond to growing need for collaboration by offering an open access home for interdisciplinary research.

"Options for open access publication have been increasingly abundant fairly widely for scientists over recent years. But there are fewer options if you are a sociologist, fewer still if you are a historian. And the options don’t increase if you are conducting interdisciplinary research, with many journals still reflecting traditional discipline boundaries. We see this as a particular need given the rise of funding streams for interdisciplinary work: What if your funder mandates that you must publish open access – but you can’t find a journal which is the right fit for your findings? And then there is the rather more idealistic premise that interdisciplinary thinking can benefit the outcomes and breadth of use of research and therefore society as a whole. This is why we’ve launched Palgrave Communications  - a high-quality peer-reviewed research in all areas of the humanities, the social sciences and business. The new journal will champion, and particularly welcome interdisciplinary research, fostering interaction, creativity and reflection within and between disciplines. Palgrave Communications will offer immediate, free online dissemination via a CC BY license (other licenses are available on request.)  Many open access journals will pledge to publish all work so long as it is methodologically sound, but Palgrave Communications is committed to high-quality, original research, published speedily. In order to help us do this, we hope to build an editorial board of hundreds of expert scholars across the HSS subjects. We already have over eighty editorial board members. As costs are involved in every stage of the publication process, from peer-review to curation, copy editing, production of multiple formats and hosting the final article on dedicated servers, authors will be asked to pay an article-processing charge (APC) in order for their article to be published open access, without access control. After paying the one-off APC of £750+VAT, if they would like authors can also post the final, published PDF of their article on a web site, institutional repository or other free public server, immediately on publication. We hope that eventually, Palgrave Communications will be the definitive peer-reviewed outlet for open access academic research, in and between our subjects; giving high quality, interdisciplinary research a home, and making it open and accessible too ..."