Irish Humanities Alliance Position Paper: Open Access and the Humanities

This position paper on ‘Open Access and the Humanities’has been prepared by a working group of the Irish Humanities Alliance (IHA) Board to represent the perspectives of the Irish humanities research community as the Irish research system transitionsto open access.Openaccess may be defined, broadly,as the processthrough which research outputs are distributed online, free of cost or other access barriers. Furthermore, ‘gold open access’ refers to the publication of research in an online open access journal whereas ‘green open access’ refers to the self-archiving of a publication in an open access repository. Diamond open access is a not-for-profit publishing practice that represents an upgrade from the Gold model. As per our February 2019 statementon ‘Plan S’, which outlines the alignment of open access policies of national, supranational and charitable research funders towards a number of key principles, the IHA broadly welcomes the principles underpinning open access. Open access promotes the exchange of knowledge and the dissemination of research findings – so critical to informed citizenship and the ideal of an open, democratic society. We welcome initiatives that facilitate the dissemination of scholarship to a wider audience and acknowledge, in particular, the desirability of making the outputs of publicly funded research more freely available. We see that these developments will have a transformative impact on researchand academic developmentmore generally, and therefore wish to engage in shaping aresourcedopen research ecosystem which facilitates access to research on a broad scale, inclusive of research produced by individual researchers not associated with specific grants. However, very significant differences exist between the different fields of study and thetransition to open access needs to be balanced against these, and the principles ofacademic freedom and scholarly reputation.1While grants are very significant, many researchers in the humanities develop work on an individual basis, rather than working as members of funded research teams.Humanities institutes, departments and researchers in Ireland are internationally recognisedas leaders across several fields. It is therefore imperative that open access strategies at national level are responsive to the needs of the humanities researchercommunityand promote continued research excellence.We welcome thisopportunity to outlinethe variations in publishing practices that exist across our disciplinesand weurge those developing a National Action Plan for the transition to an open research environmentto ensure that it will serve the needs of all disciplines, includingthe arts and humanities.As this paper shows, the IHA is keen to engagein a productive dialogue and we aim to work towards an open access policy that protects the diverse expressions of humanities scholarship.