The Humanities and Open Access : a qualitative study of the motivations and strategies of literary scholars facing publication

The natural sciences and the humanities are associated with differentpublishing patterns. Open Access publishing are mainly associated withthe publishing patterns of the natural sciences. Many Swedishuniversities and research funders are proponents of Open Accesspublishing, what will that trend mean to the scholars with a publishingpattern not corresponding to Open Access? In this paper literary scholarsare interviewed for the purpose of learning the motives and strategieswhich form their publishing pattern, and how they relate to Open Accesspublishing. The results show that literary scholars are less competitiveand hold a more gentle knowledge-sharing ideal, than natural scientists.The drive to gain acknowledgment and the recognition of colleagues inorder to collect academic capital as Bourdieu describes the academicfield is still present though. The literary scholars publishes theirmaterials to a greater degree than natural scientists in a variety offormats, such as cultural magazines, books, Festschrifts and bookreviews. They value the exchange of information with non-academics aswell as colleagues. However, increased focus on productivity measuredin cited articles are threatening their non-academic publishing. OpenAccess offers a way of keeping the information exchange with nonacademics,while still enabling publishing in academic journals. Thestudy results show that the low degree of Open Access publishing amongliterary scholars are due to their assessment of what type of publicationwill lead the most efficient publishing, that it is a practical decision eventhough the Open Access ideals are appealing to the scholars.Program: Bibliotekari