7.4.4Open Access in the SSH

Bibliometric studies have shown that the Social Sciences were quick to adopt OA practices after the initiation of OA in some natural sciences disciplines, but the Humanities, Law and Arts still lag behind in terms of OA publishing (Gargouri et al., 2012; Severin et al., 2020). Meanwhile, a cross-country overview of OA journals from 2000 to 2019 has shown that the Arts and Humanities and the Social Sciences do not lag behind in terms of the ratio of OA journals in Scimago (Demeter et al., 2021). A few barriers to the uptake of OA in Social Sciences and Humanities are the lack of funding for Article Processing Charges and Book Processing Charges and the continued importance of the monograph, which is more expensive to produce and thus to fund (Severin et al., 2020). Meanwhile, it has also been argued that the incentives for publishing OA in the Humanities are less immediate (Suber, 2017) and that OA is met with some specific resistance in from the non-scientific disciplines (Eve, 2015). The uptake of OA practices has been noted to be especially low for the discipline Law (Severin et al., 2020).

Bibliometric studies of OA publishing only rarely include OA book publications, and usually rely on commercial indexing services such as Elsevier’s Scopus and Clarivate’s Web of Science indexes. As such, they are less suitable to fields where books and domestic languages are more prevalent. Zven more comprehensive, DOI-based services like Unpaywall pose challenges, because in some areas of the SSH the use of DOIs is still limited, as we will see in the next section. A very comprehensive analysis of OA in Finland based on a variety of data sources as well as a more or less complete overview of the peer-reviewed output in Finland has shown similar levels of OA across fields, including for the social sciences and humanities (Pölönen et al., 2020).

Open repositories are an important OA route in the Social Sciences (Severin et al., 2020). Important platforms are SocArXiv, and more specific servers such as EdArXiv or PsyArXiv. For the Humanities, the Open Library of Humanities is an example of an innovative Diamond OA model publisher (see next section). For books, the platform Knowledge Unlatched uses a model of library crowdsourcing to make book publications freely available. OAPEN is an OA book publication platform offering services to libraries, researchers and working together with publishers. OAPEN also hosts the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB).