Ethnological Disciplines

As of December 2025, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listed over 150 journals under “Ethnology. Social and Cultural Anthropology”.

Scholars in the ethnological disciplines publish in subject-specific journals, field-specific journals (e.g. science studies, migration research, gender studies, museum research, urban research), and region-specific journals. The main focus in what follows is on subject-specific journals.

Well-known German-language open access journals include:

• Baessler-Archiv
• Berliner Blätter *
• Bricolage *
• Ethnoscripts *
• Hamburger Journal für Kulturanthropologie *
• Kulturanthropologie Notizen *
• Österreichische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde
• Paideuma
• Schweizerisches Archiv für Volkskunde (Access via the publisher )
• Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie
• Zeitschrift für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft
• Zeitschrift für Ethnologie (Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology)

(* Journals marked with an asterisk publish mainly or exclusively thematic special issues.)

Well-known English-language open access journals include:

• Anthropological Journal of European Cultures doaj
• Cultural Anthropology doaj
• Ethnologia Europaea doaj
• Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics
• Social Analysis doaj
• Social Anthropology doaj
• Teaching Anthropology
• The Cambridge Journal of Anthropologydoaj

Because of the breadth of publications in the ethnological disciplines and the fact that these disciplines are assigned to the social sciences, the humanities, and the cultural sciences, relevant field-specific and transdisciplinary open access journals can also be added to the list. They include, for example:

• Curare – Zeitschrift für Medizinethnologie *
• Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung doaj
• Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology doaj
• Journal of Legal Anthropology doaj
• kommunikation@gesellschaft
• Movements – Journal für kritische Migrations- und Grenzregimeforschung *
• Mobile Culture Studies * doaj
• Open Gender Journal doaj
• sub\urban – Zeitschrift für kritische Stadtforschung *
• Urbanities – Journal of Urban Ethnography

(* Journals marked with an asterisk publish mainly or exclusively thematic special issues.)

Also worthy of mention is the Journal of Political Ecology, which is in part anthro­pologically oriented. It has been published open access since 1994 and is thus one of the first and oldest open access journals in the social sciences.

From time to time, several journals are bundled and converted to open access. This is usually done using consortial funding models, where the required funding is jointly provided by many institutions. In 2020, numerous journals published with Berghahn Books were converted to open access by means of the subscribe-to-open variant. The package now comprises 16 journals (besides those already mentioned, they include Anthropology of the Middle East, Focaal, Museum Worlds, and Religion and Society). In 2024, with the support of the Specialised Information Service for Social and Cultural Anthropology (FID SKA) and the Saxon State and University Library Dresden (SLUB), consortial funding for an initial period of 3 years enabled the open access of a bundle of six German-language, scholar-led journals.

Conversions of journals from open access to closed access or the restriction of the open access publishing model are rare, but for various reasons they sometimes happen – usually due to funding problems – also in the case of journals from the ethnological disciplines. Six years after its launch as a purely open access journal, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, which has already been mentioned above, switched to a publishing model that combines closed access (with a subscription option) and partial open access (temporary for new issues and permanent for selected articles and target groups; see da Col, 2017). The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture and the journal Human Affairs, both of which were open access for a time, were reconverted to closed access (subscription with hybrid publishing model). Furthermore, the discontinuation of journals is common and also affects open access journals, for example Open Anthropology, an open access pilot experiment conducted by the American Anthropological Association from 2013 to 2022, and the Museum Anthropology Review, which was launched in 2007 and discontinued in 2023 (Jackson, 2023).

It should also be mentioned that back issues of numerous journals are freely accessible. Via a digitisation project by the Specialised Information Service for Social and Cultural Anthropology (FID SKA), the back issues of many German-language ethnological journals are freely accessible. The respective time lag relative to the latest issue differs from journal to journal. The journals in question include Anthropos, Baessler-Archiv, Sociologus, Zeitschrift für Volkskunde (predecessor of Zeitschrift für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft) and Zeitschrift für Ethnologie. The archives of the journals Tsantsa (predecessor of Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie), Schweizerisches Archiv für Volkskunde, and Österreichische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde are completely freely accessible. So too is the archive of Ethnologia Europaea. Until 2022, all issues of American Anthropologist, the primary journal of the American Anthropological Association, that were over 35 years old were freely accessible. That is no longer the case.

Open access is remarkably widespread among journals in the ethnological disciplines in the Ibero-American region, where open access is generally better established. Spanish-language journals from the ethnological disciplines are almost without exception open access. Well-known publications include AIBR – Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana, Chungara, Etnográfica, Horizontes Antropológicos, Intersecciones en Antropología, and Mana – Estudos de Antropologia Social.

Important repositories in the ethnological disciplines include:

• Open Anthropology Research Repository
• Social Science Open Access Repository
• SocArXiv
• Social Sciences Research Network

With the EthnOA repositories for texts and audiovisual media, the Specialised Information Service for Social and Cultural Anthropology (FID SKA) provides a cross-institutional offering for open access publishing and self-archiving. The offering also targets researchers who are not affiliated with an institution or who do not have access to an institutional repository.

Because of the previously mentioned multi-disciplinarity of the field, repositories for specific lines of research are also an option. They include, for example, CrossAsia-Repository for Asia studies, GenderOpen for gender studies, MENAdoc for Middle East and Islamic studies, and OstDok for research on Eastern, Central Eastern, and South-Eastern Europe.

The Open Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) also provides an overview of other possible relevant repositories.

The aspiration of open science to extend the principle of openness to the entire research cycle, from the first idea to the final publication, and thus to make all forms of scholarly knowledge open access, transparent, and reusable, has far-reaching consequences and brings significant challenges for ethnological disciplines and ethnographic research. It is therefore the subject of controversial debate.

This becomes particularly clear in the case of open research data. In light of increasing requirements imposed by research funders, research data management and the archiving and reuse of ethnographic materials in particular have been addressed more intensively in the ethnological disciplines since around 2016. What is problematic for the ethnological disciplines – and for other social sciences – is that the specific characteristics of qualitative data, and especially data from ethnographic research, are not adequately taken into account. Rather, funders’ requirements are based on an understanding of data in the sense of raw data and primary data, as found in particular in the natural science disciplines and quantitatively oriented research areas. In the ethnological disciplines, the term “data” is used in a specific sense: Data are understood as being generated in the social process of field research and as embedded in field relationships. It is therefore not possible – or possible only to a limited extent – to make ethnographic research data, which usually contain sensitive information about persons or groups, openly accessible. Rather, openness must be considered and weighed up in relation to the respective concrete research fields as well as from a research ethics and legal perspective. Relevant aspects and important issues include (a) whether adequate consent has been obtained from individuals in the field, or whether it is even possible to obtain such consent in the first place; (b) whether research data belong to the researchers alone (e.g. in the case of interviews or recordings of conversational situations); and (c) what consequences may arise from this, or how protective measures such as pseudonymisation or anonymisation affect the reusability of ethnographic material. Obligations to provide open access to research data are broadly rejected, especially on legal and ethical grounds, coupled with fears that research, especially in confidential and sensitive contexts, could be made more difficult or even impossible. (On these and other aspects, and on research data management in general, see Imeri 2018, 2019). Several professional associations have published position papers on these issues and on the discipline-specific requirements in dealing with research data and have made their debates transparent in scholarly publications. The Specialised Information Service for Social and Cultural Anthropology (FID SKA) portal EVIFA provides comprehensive information on research data in the ethnological disciplines.

Furthermore, within the framework of the FID SKA, workflows and procedures that enable the archiving and reuse of almost the entire range of ethnographic data have been developed at the data service centre Qualiservice at the University of Bremen (Rizzolli et al., 2024). Qualiservice offers advice for individual researchers as well as for projects, project consortia, and institutions.

DATA AFFAIRS, a platform developed at Collaborative Research Centre 1171 “Affective Societies” at Freie Universität Berlin, invites researchers, teachers, and students to engage in interactive learning on the topic of data management in ethnographic research. Besides texts on individual aspects of data management, it also contains illustrative examples, experience reports, exercises, a glossary, and more.

Open methodology – that is, the disclosure of methods developed or used in the research process – is not in fact new to the ethnological disciplines. As a rule, methods are disclosed and discussed in publications, especially in monographic ethnographies. When doing so, the consequences of the chosen approach for the research process are reflected upon. In this regard, the connection with and the relevance of open access should be stressed. The situation is different in cases where the disclosure of methods is expected to take place before or during the actual research process, and where open methodology in the broader sense is thus also understood as the transparent and open documentation of the steps in the research process. Because of the close links with the research field and the research data, the challenges – and therefore also the complex issues that arise here – are similar to those in the case of open data.

Open source – that is, making source code available in open access – has played hardly any role in the ethnological disciplines to date, as programs and software are seldom developed in these fields of research. However, there are no fundamental arguments against open source. In the case of software used in research in the ethnological disciplines, especially for qualitative data analysis, there is indeed potential for increasing support for the development and use of open source software. This is relevant not least because the functioning of the mostly proprietary software used in these disciplines is a black box, and disclosure of this part of the method is thus not completely possible.

In the case of open evaluation, there is no notable difference between the ethnological disciplines and other fields. Thus, open peer review would be just as possible in the ethnological disciplines as in other disciplines. To date, however, no journals or other publishing models in the ethnological disciplines use open peer review. SOCIOS, which was established in 2024, is an open peer review platform for preprints in the social sciences, and thus also for the ethnological disciplines.

The provision of open and free-of-charge access to teaching materials (open educational resources, OER) is closely linked to the publication of books and journals open access. For example, the introductory textbook  Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology (2017; 2nd, revised ed. 2020) was published open access.