Gender Studies

Quelle: Brinken, H. (2020). Finanzierung von Open-Access-Artikeln, open-access.network. https://doi.org/10.5446/49536 (CC BY 3.0 DE)

Gender studies is a field of knowledge that is strongly characterised by inter- or transdisciplinary work methods and in which a variety of disciplinary approaches can be found. In many cases, the publishing practices and venues of gender researchers depend on the specialist disciplines involved and are correspondingly heterogeneous. However, there are also several publications with a decidedly inter- or transdisciplinary focus. For the most part, gender researchers publish their works in journals, edited volumes, and monographs. In addition, handbooks, science blogs, and various other transfer formats are widespread. Preprints, by contrast, play hardly any role at all.

Open access publishing offers enormous opportunities, especially for gender studies. Because of political reservations with regard to gender studies, and the ambiguous location of the field between the disciplines, its results are subjected to reception barriers. The potentially greater visibility and the direct access to full texts enables open access publications to overcome these barriers and thus demonstrate their quality.

The opportunities offered by electronic publishing, and especially by open access, are now widely acknowledged in gender studies. There are now several open access publications In German-language gender studies, in particular journals and science blogs. There has also been a gradual increase in the number of publications in the area of open access books. Internationally, two developments can be distinguished: On the one hand, relevant, mainly English-language publications on gender studies are being published with large commercial publishers, which, to date, unfortunately offer only hybrid open access options against payment of publication charges. On the other hand, there are a growing number of open access publications in the non-English-speaking world that use no-fee and scholar-led open access models, thereby making an important contribution to bibliodiversity.

The German Gender Studies Association (Fachgesellschaft Geschlechterstu­dien) actively supports open access publishing. As one of the four editors of the Open Gender Journal, and as the provider of the Open Gender Platform, the association has anchored open access as an important field of activity in its task spectrum. In addition, within the association, the working group Open Digital Gender connects existing initiatives and engages with current developments in the areas of open access and open science.

The handbook “Politik und Geschlecht” [Politics and Gender] (edited by Christine M. Klapeer, Johanna Leinius, Franziska Martinsen, Heike Mauer, and Inga Nüthen), the first edition of which was published in 2017, is an open access introductory work to gender studies that is continuously supplemented and updated. This “living encyclopaedia” was created within the framework of the BMBF-funded project OAPEnz as a collaboration between ZB MED – Information Centre for Life Sciences and the publisher Barbara Budrich.

In addition to classical scholarly journals, there are also several open access gender studies science blogs. The posts in the blog interdisziplinäre geschlechterforschung, an interdisciplinary gender studies blog published by the Koordinations- und Forschungsstelle Netzwerk Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung NRW (Coordination and Research Office of the Women’s and Gender Research Network of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia), are preserved long-term in the repository of the Library of the University of Duisburg-Essen. The Genderblog of the Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin focuses on the publication of findings, projects, and debates from gender studies research and teaching at the university.

With GenderOpen, which was established in 2018, gender studies has a disciplinary open access repository that ensures the long-term availability of publications under open access conditions. The repository also informs authors about their rights in the areas of self-archiving and the secondary publication right (Zweitveröffentlichungsrecht), thereby creating an awareness of the possibilities granted to them under German copyright law. In many cases, targeted collaborations with relevant scholarly publishers enable the self-archiving of the original publisher’s version and the corresponding metadata after expiry of an embargo period.

Furthermore, there are collaborations between the GenderOpen repository and the publishers Barbara Budrich and De Gruyter, on the basis of which the original publisher’s version of electronic full texts of articles from certain journals and the corresponding metadata may be made freely available after the expiry of an embargo period. Authors have the possibility of deciding at the time of publication that their contributions are to be made available under a Creative Commons (CC) licence after this embargo period. GenderOpen then releases the contributions automatically. This applies to the following journals:

• FZG – Freiburger Zeitschrift für GeschlechterStudien (embargo: 24 months)
• FEMINA POLITICA – Zeitschrift für feministische Politikwissenschaft (embargo: 36 months)
• Feministische Studien (embargo: 24 months)

The GenderOpen keyword index, Schlagwortindex GenderOpen, is a controlled vocabulary for the substantive description of gender studies publications. Developed within the framework of GenderOpen, it is also used by several journals, the Digital German Women’s Archive (Digitales Deutsches Frauenarchiv, DDF), and the Gutachter*innen-Datenbank, a reviewers database. In 2019, GenderOpen received the DINI Certificate for Open Access Publication Services. An overview of relevant repositories is also provided by the Open Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR).

The online archives JSTOR and Project MUSE now also provide open access content relevant to gender studies.

The topic of open research data is being taken up only hesitantly in gender stu­dies. According to a needs analysis on research data infrastructure in gender studies, only a few researchers have experience of the reuse of research data. The difficulties in disciplinarily classifying gender studies repeat themselves also in relation to open research data. To date, there are no explicitly designated re­search repositories for gender studies. Even when metadata have been properly recorded, a search always requires the use of various search strategies with different storage locations, keywords, and disciplines. However, whether an independent storage location for open research data is called for in an inter- and transdisciplinary field such as gender studies, in which researchers work with diverse types of data, has not yet been conclusively settled.