Open Access: an opportunity to redesign scholarly communication in history

Abstract

While the adoption of open access to academic publications was slowerand more difficult in the humanities and in particular in history than in the scien-tific and technical disciplines, it is today more and more widely accepted by thecommunity of historians. The number of open access peer-reviewed journals isgrowing, thanks to the support of multidisciplinary platforms and tools, such asOpenEdition, Scielo and OJS. However, many journals still adopt an embargo periodto protect the sales of their print edition. Research monographs in history are alsomore frequently available in open access. It is interesting to see that new academicpresses, purely digital and adopting completely open access, such as UCL Press,Ubiquity Press and OBP were created in recent years to address the growing need ofresearchers in the humanities and social sciences. Finally, in the context of openscience, which is larger than open access to publications, new forms of communica-tion are experimented, that combine with open data (e.g. data journals) or withnew ways of interacting with society (e.g academic blogs). These more recent explo-rations in open scholarly communications are promising perspectives for histori-ans, in particular when they are involved in public history.