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The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of open research and the sharing of data in the medical sciences, but more could be done to encourage the same, open attitudes towards social science and humanities (SSH) disciplines, which also played significant roles in analyzing social and cultural implications of the global crisis.

For this blog post, Maciej Maryl, Marta Błaszczyńska, Agnieszka Szulińska and Paweł Rams (all from the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland) discuss opportunities for disrupting the status quo to better cater for the publication of SSH research.

At the Digital Humanities Centre at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBL PAN), we apply digital methods to the study of literature and culture. Maciej is the Centre’s Founding Head, working on sociology of literature using network analysis and natural language processing methods. Marta coordinates the Centre and serves as the Senior Open Science Officer, while finishing her PhD thesis dedicated to the representation of Jews on the Polish Internet. Agnieszka works as TEI Encoding Supervisor at New Panorama of Polish Literature, our platform for extended monographs and digital scholarly editions. Finally, Paweł’s research is focused on digital editions and the history of communism in Poland.

The Digital Humanities Centre brings together colleagues interested in several areas: digital literary studies, digital scholarly editions, research data, bibliodata and bibliographic data in the humanities and in the GLAM sector, scholarly communication, digital humanities meta-research, and digital and media history of the Cold War. Despite the diverse interests and projects, one thing that all the initiatives have in common is the dedication to open science. We believe that unrestricted access to scholarly knowledge is a fundamental human right. Yet, despite the mounting evidence supporting how crucial the access is for the advancement of research – to name just the recent COVID-19 emergency – we note that conflicting interests of various actors and systemic obstacles seem to halt the advancement of open science. And this is where the idea for our Opinion Article appeared.

Identifying what is needed from the scholarly infrastructure

The article is an outcome of OPERAS-P, an inspiring 24-months Horizon 2020 project that has fostered the development of OPERAS, a European research infrastructure dedicated to open scholarly communication in social sciences and humanities. The main focus has been on identifying what the social sciences and humanities scholars actually need from an infrastructure. IBL PAN has established OPERAS Lab as a unique space to explore novel forms of scholarly communication. For example, as part of our more recent work together with colleagues from other institutions, we have conducted interviews with researchers, journal editors and reviewers, as well as scholarly publishers, to explore writing practices of the SSH community and the attitudes to innovation. Agnieszka and Paweł collected and analysed over 50 existing case studies: tools, platforms, examples of digital projects that aim to support the researchers in doing digital scholarship and publishing their work in non-traditional ways.

The OPERAS community has been growing rapidly in recent years and IBL PAN has been proud to be its member. We think that it’s important to identify the needs of the SSH researchers and to present them to the wider audience as a blueprint for large research infrastructures, like OPERAS. The timing was also crucial. Although we started the work in 2019, we wrote the article during the pandemic, which highlighted the need for open science in general and open research infrastructures such as OPERAS more specifically. While it was clear that the medical research needed to be made as accessible as possible, humanities and social sciences also played a significant role in providing the frameworks for analysing the social and cultural implications of the crisis. Moreover, many of the sudden decisions of commercial scholarly content providers towards opening up their resources were, unfortunately, short-lived.

Unpacking the infrastructure and proposing an inclusive landscape

There are several layers that need to be unpacked. The scholarly communication landscape in the SSH is very diverse,  which is not in itself a bad thing, but more communication and coordination between different institutions and stakeholders is needed. Moreover, the open science policies vary across Europe and there’s no consensus among researchers on how important and prestigious open access is. Similarly, digital innovations are adopted to a varying extent by different disciplines and individual scholars, with some curious and eager to experiment with different forms and others sticking to safer, more traditional solutions (interestingly, it often has nothing to do with the career stage!). 

The evaluation criteria have not caught up with the digital transformation and so many authors end up publishing via more traditional outputs even though they would rather experiment with the former as they know that they need to have the established publications  – for example articles in prestigious journals – on their academic resume.

There is another issue linked to evaluation: often publications in English are recognised as more valuable by funders or institutions which is not the best situation, especially in the case of domestic authors addressing important local issues in their native language.

There are several layers to a successful research infrastructure in the SSH. Firstly -and this really is key -it needs to be inclusive, so open to different stakeholders representing diverse perspectives.

Secondly, the infrastructure has to be dedicated to the specific traits of SSH: for example, research outputs often tend to be more traditional than in the case of hard sciences (‘the monograph is the king,’ claimed one of our interviewees in the OPERAS-P project) and there is often less funding for opening up research. Multilingualism is also an important aspect of the SSH as it is crucial that a topic that is important to smaller, local communities can be presented to them in a way that they can understand.

Thirdly, it needs to be researcher-driven, thus reflecting the actual needs of the scholars and be developed with the collaborators from various academic circles.

Final thoughts

We have just finished our work on the future of scholarly writing in SSH and will be soon publishing the final report from the OPERAS-P project with regards to innovation in scholarly communication. We will present the key recommendations for various stakeholders in the areas of innovation in scholarly communication, suggesting what should be done to make open science reality in SSH. The fields we have focused on include: governance, OA business models, FAIR data, bibliodiversity, writing and evaluation of the SSH research. Our target groups extend beyond the OPERAS community and include the funders, publishers, librarians, and researchers themselves, as a systemic change in scholarly communication requires a cooperation of different actors. 

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Read the full Opinion Article, ‘The case for an inclusive scholarly communication infrastructure for social sciences and humanities’ >>