Scholarly Communication: Humanities and Social Sciences
I chose to examine scholarly communication trends and changes within the Humanities and the Social Sciences. Since I studied Feminist Theory in my first graduate program, I wanted to understand the factors at play when it came to scholars in this discipline publishing and producing their work.
As I had imagined, there is a very real and very visceral shift in the interactions among publishing and technology. This shift is witnessing an increase in digital publishing and the incorporation of technology practices within scholarly work; in other words, there is a move away from paper publishing and a general push toward electronic and open access. This movement centers on the elimination of obstacles and barriers prevalent in publishing like copyright and licensing, visibility and accessibility to information and scholarly investigation, reduction of costs, and quicker delivery of information (Nayaran et al., 2018, p. 168). While conversations about open access are taking place—which is both necessary and a matter of equity—I doubt that full open access will ever be achievable. Ultimately, publishing within academia is an established and seemingly impenetrable institution that is perpetuated by the very traditions in place. In fact, Shehata et al. (2015) declare that of scholars that participated in their study, “many feel that traditional peer-reviewed journals are irreplaceable as it is the only way to measure the researcher’s contribution in science” (p. 1156). As such, there appear to be clear internal resistances to a total and complete change in the established and honored practices within publishing and communication. A question that comes to mind is whether scholars of color, scholars from minoritized communities, or scholars from overexploited countries are experiencing the benefits from open access and publishing their research. Specifically, Fenlon et al. (2019) comments on this phenomenon and discusses how humanities scholars have specific needs when it comes to publishing and more often than not, they face heightened obstacles when publishing digitally in comparison to researchers in other disciplines (p. 160).
With that being said, change is happening, and it is inevitable; as various sources have stated, technology is forever altering the direction of scholarly communication. Fenlon et al. (2019) discloses that, “humanities scholars have increasingly turned to digital publishing” (p. 160). Nayaran et al. (2018) discusses how “Web technologies have fundamentally altered the nature of scholarly communication…” while simultaneously offering, “essential infrastructure to support OA [open access] practices” (p. 171). Furthermore, digital publishing and web technologies predictably involves social media platforms. This was something that I expected. Though I did not publish in graduate school, one of the ways I would search for additional information was through social media platforms. For instance, once I found a book or a journal article that assisted with my research, I would search for the scholar either on Twitter or ResearchGate to see what other professors, theorists, and scholars they followed and engaged with in the former, and to review what other articles they had published in the latter.
The research examining the evolution in scholarly communication in the Humanities and Social Sciences appears to be an area that is gaining more attention inside and outside the United States—primarily Europe. I would be interested to see how open access and technology has impacted research being published in Latin America and in the global south and how scholars from these areas are mitigating the barriers and challenges as well as the benefits.
References
Fenlon, K., Senseney, M., Bonn, M., & Swatscheno, J. (2019). Humanities scholars and library-based Digital Publishing: New forms of publication, new audiences, new publishing roles. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 50(3), 159–182. https://doi.org/10.3138/jsp.50.3.01
Narayan, B., Luca, E. J., Tiffen, B., England, A., Booth, M., & Boateng, H. (2018). Scholarly Communication Practices in Humanities and Social Sciences: A study of researchers’ attitudes and awareness of open access. Open Information Science, 2(1), 168–180. https://doi.org/10.1515/opis-2018-0013
Shehata, A., Ellis, D., & Foster, A. (2015). Scholarly Communication Trends in the Digital Age: Informal Scholarly Publishing and Dissemination, A Grounded Theory Approach. The Electronic Library, 33(6), 1150–1162. https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-09-2014-0160