Open Access for the Humanities Over the past decade, researchers have increasingly Open Access helps rectify this by providing unrestricted looked towards Open Access as a way of disseminating access to the literature and reducing the overall cost their work online to anyone who requires access. The of publishing in the process. Governments and other cost of subscribing to journals is high and rising, and research funders – and universities – are recognising libraries are unable to offer a complete range of journals this and putting in place mandates for OA but, with the to their readers as a result. Furthermore, as journal policy scene becoming quite complex, and burdened with subscriptions rise, libraries have been forced to dip increasing administrative pressures in general, it can be into the budgets previously allocated to monographs. difficult for researchers to identify where to begin. There This has had a detrimental and disproportionate are, however, a variety of outlets for both Green and effect on humanities disciplines, which rely largely on Gold Open Access in the humanities, each with their own book-length works as the primary method of research benefits for your work. This guide will explore the various communication. Open Access outlets available to humanities researchers and will discuss the issues surrounding them. Open Access for the Humanities Journal Articles providing you also self-archive your work. However, others say that this simply perpetuates the existing Research articles can be made Open Access through journal system and does little to help ease the budgets either Open Access journals or repositories. of libraries, which must continue to subscribe to the toll- Green Open Access access (subscription-based) journals that their readers So-called ‘Green’ Open Access involves you publishing are used to. One solution to this is to publish your your article in the journal of your choice, even when research in Open Access journals, often known as Gold this is not Open Access, and providing OA to all those Open Access. who do not have subscriber access to that journal Gold Open Access by depositing (‘self-archiving’) your article in an For Open Access in journals, known as ‘Gold’ Open institutional or subject-specific repository. Depositing Access, articles are made Open Access at the point is usually done at the point when the manuscript is of publication, sometimes with an ‘article processing accepted for publication in a journal. The very best charge’ (APC) but often without one. place to start this process is your own institution: many universities now maintain Open Access repositories as The number of Open Access journals is rapidly way of showcasing their research. A good example of an increasing in the humanities. The Directory of Open institutional repository is Discovery at University College Access Journals, searchable by subject area, lists almost London. To find a suitable Open Access repository for 10,000 journals (not all in the humanities) from over your work you can consult the extensive lists available 120 countries and these are supported by a variety of from the Directory of Open Access Repositories and the funding mechanisms. For instance, all of the fourteen Registry of Open Access Repositories. journals published by the not-for-profit Open Humanities Press (OHP) operate with no article fees at all, sustained Uploading your work to an institutional repository in partnership with the University of Michigan Library. is a simple way of ensuring that it will always be Similarly, the soon-to-launch Open Library of Humanities available to anyone who needs access. It also helps (OLH) will publish research from all areas of the you understand the use and impact of your work humanities and will cover publication costs through as repositories often provide download and citation library subventions and other sponsorship. Both OHP statistics so you can track the real-time impact of and the OLH have recruited editorial boards of senior your research. scholars from all areas of the humanities, offering the Self-archiving is free and easy to do. Once your article same high-quality peer-review standards as has been accepted by a journal, you then upload subscription journals. the article directly to the repository and provide Whilst the majority of Open Access journals do not levy accompanying metadata – the descriptive data such an APC to cover their costs, there are some that do. It as author names, affiliations, title, abstract and details is important to remember that the payment of APCs is of the journal where it is published. It is important to intended to be routed through your institution and so remember that most traditional journals will not let you you should contact your librarian for advice on the funds upload the final typeset and copyedited PDF of your available. For example, Ubiquity Press publishes a suite article, which is subject to the publisher’s copyright, of humanities journals, such as Stability in international and so in those cases you should upload the accepted development, whose APCs range from 100-250 GB version (your own final document in Word or similar) Pounds (GBP). Likewise, Sage Open currently charges a and provide the details of the journal in which it is discounted APC of US$99 and publishes articles from all published in the repository entry. areas of the humanities and social sciences. To increase the discoverability of your research, you As more publishers in the humanities begin to charge might also upload it to a subject-specific repository. APCs, two principles should be followed to ensure Subject repositories, such as PhilPapers in philosophy, fairness and sustainability: are an excellent way of highlighting your work within a disciplinary community, particularly as many researchers • APCs should be waivable for anyone who does not now use them as the first point of call for discovering have access to funds. This will ensure that all research. Whilst they are not yet available in all fields, scholars will be able to publish their work there is likely to be a repository in your broad subject irrespective of their institution’s financial situation. area. The Directory of Open Access Repositories, This is particularly important for junior and which can be searched by subject area, is a useful independent scholars, in addition to scholars from starting point. low- and middle-income countries. Reputable publishers will list their fee waiver policy on For many researchers, an attractive feature of Green their website. Open Access is that you can publish your research in the same subscription journals you normally would use, Page 1 Open Access for the Humanities • APCs should be transparent so you know exactly Open Access. Whilst this does mean that you can how the funds are being spent and the services publish with a range of traditional publishers, you they provide. This will ensure that they are kept as will still need to convince the publisher that your low as possible, which will save money for the book is worth making Open Access and so it overall research budget as more journals become is worth outlining your intentions when you submit Open Access. your manuscript Books The Future Despite this progress on Open Access by journals, Open Access offers the perfect opportunity for scholars to monographs are the main currency in most humanities reassess their publication practices and experiment with subjects and a number of initiatives with a wide variety of new forms of scholarship. As more journals become Open models have recently launched to make books Open Access, and more content is made available for scholarly Access too. reuse via Creative Commons Licences, new avenues of research presentation can be explored. One model is The OAPEN Library and Directory of Open Access Books where readers are able to make comments on the book are excellent resources for Open Access books in the and revisions are made to the work post-publication. For humanities and social sciences. These two sites are good example, Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence places to familiarise yourself with the publishers that was published and peer-reviewed online as a way of are releasing Open Access books. As with all academic experimenting with open review (whereby the author publications, Open Access books are peer-reviewed, knew the identities of the reviewers). Similarly, initiatives professionally typeset and available in both printed and such as Scalar and Hybrid Publishing look to explore the electronic formats. full potential of scholarly publishing in the digital age, There are a number of ways that publishers look to cover going beyond the printed word on the page and trying the costs associated with book publishing. out collaborative, non-linear, and media-rich works of • Print sales. The most common model is for scholarship. publishers cover the costs associated with book Open Access is the foundation of all these new and publishing by selling the print version, enabling promising opportunities for humanities research. We can them to release the electronic ve rsion for free look forward to major advances in knowledge generation, • Publication fee. Some publishers request a one- innovation and creativity as our research base opens up. off payment to make a book Open Access. For This briefing paper was written for SPARC Europe by example, Manchester University Press charges a Samuel Moore of the Department of Digital Humanities, basic fee of 5,900 GBP whilst Palgrave MacMillan King’s College London, and Ubiquity Press. charges 11,000 GBP. Unless you have funding, these fees may be prohibitively expensive, but Some examples of subject-based collections of Open other publishers look to recuperate their costs in Access research material other ways • Grants or crowd funding. For example, Open Book • Art-Dok: published papers in art history Publishers is a publisher of Open Access books http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/artdok/ in the humanities and social sciences, boasting such • Archaeology Data Service: archaeology papers authors as Amartya Sen, Lionel Gossman and and datasets http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/ Caroline Humphrey.