The case for an inclusive scholarly communication infrastructure for social sciences and humanities

Abstract

This article presents a vision for a scholarly communication research infrastructure for social sciences and humanities (SSH). The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the pressing need to access research outputs without the traditional economic and temporal barriers. This article explores the current scholarly communication landscape, assessing the reasons for the slower uptake of open access in SSH research. The authors discuss such frontiers as commercial interests, sources of academic prestige and discipline-specific genres. This article defines and discusses the key areas in which a research infrastructure can play a vital role in making open scholarly communication a reality in SSH: (1) providing a federated and easy access to scattered SSH outputs; (2) supporting publication and dissemination of discipline-specific genres (e.g. monographs, critical editions); (3) providing help with evaluation and quality assurance practices in SSH; (4) enabling scholarly work in national languages, which is significant for local communities; (5) being governed by researchers and for researchers as a crucial factor for productive, useful and accessible services; (6) lastly, considering the needs of other stakeholders involved in scholarly communication, such as publishers, libraries, media, non-profit organisations, and companies. They conclude that a scholarly-driven, inclusive, dedicated infrastructure for the European Research Area is needed in order to advance open science in SSH and to address the issues tackled by SSH researchers at a structural and systemic level.

Making Open Scholarship More Equitable and Inclusive

“…Realizing these principles will require collaboration through respectful debate and discussion for the co-creation of meaningful, collective knowledge [35]. Yet barriers to collaboration exist even within the very networks themselves, aggravated by the diverse multi-disciplinary and multi-language landscape and interests of those from varied Northern and Southern contexts [57]. To address these barriers, the creation of infrastructures and practices should intentionally include the voices, worldviews, languages, and epistemologies that have to date been largely excluded from the open science system [26,40].…”

The Epistemic Cultures of the Digital Humanities and Their Relation to Open Science: Contributions to the Open Humanities Discourse

“…In humanities, although the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Social Sciences and Humanities (2003), recognized the importance of open access within these epistemic cultures, its transition reveals a smaller percentage compared to hard sciences (Suber, 2017). In addition, the scholarly communication of DH may imply different models of funding, concerning the processing fees for publication in open access, both for articles and monographs (Maryl et al, 2020). A particularity that contributes to a less rapid opening in the humanities is related to the diversity of languages -or multilingualism -used at the time of publication, related, indirectly, or directly, to the evaluation system and scientific recognition, but also the (non) implementation of the culture of preprints in the humanities, and with the peer review processes in these domains.…”

“…For these reasons, it can be said that DH is an approach carried out in the humanities, social sciences, and technology territories, incorporating digital tools in the different phases of their research cycle. The focus is on both the production and analysis of data, digital or digitized (Maryl et al, 2020). Simply put, this data deals with engaging new ways of conducting humanities research through collaborative and transdisciplinary practices in a digital medium.…”

“…The humanities reveal a more discursive character, allowing a more complex description and narrative (Maryl et al, 2020). Regarding the characteristics of their forms of scholarly communication, the prevailing medium continues to be the monograph and book chapters, which, by itself, take more time to produce and distribute, and also have more costs associated.…”

“…Regarding the characteristics of their forms of scholarly communication, the prevailing medium continues to be the monograph and book chapters, which, by itself, take more time to produce and distribute, and also have more costs associated. They also display certain specificities concerning their epistemology, workflow, collaboration, and argumentation, maintaining a close connection with the local context (Cronin, 2003;Giglia, 2019;Knöchelmann, 2019;Maryl et al, 2020). It is, for this reason, their communication is often directed to specific geographic areas and cultural situations, and, therefore, in the native languages of the context in which the research is produced, instead of what is seen in the areas of the hard sciences, in which English is considered the lingua franca.…”