Political Science

Political science is characterised by overlaps with other disciplines, for example sociology, history, law and administrative science, and philosophy. Depending on the sub-discipline, it is influenced by developments in the culture of neighbouring disciplines and adopts their methods.

Whereas the humanities-oriented fields of political science, such as political theory, continue to have a strong affinity for book publishing, and open access has therefore not yet become very firmly established there, a more dynamic development towards open access can be observed in the sub-disciplines with a social science and international focus, where journal articles are the dominant form of distribution of research results.

The American Political Science Association (APSA), which is the most important political science association in the world, has been operating APSA Preprints, an open access publication platform for political science preprints, since 2019.

In 2024, the largest political science association in Germany, the German Political Science Association (GPSA), published a statement on open access and open science (in German), in which it underscored the importance of diamond open access in cooperation with independent publishers or non-profit-oriented research infrastructures as an important prerequisite for the success of the open access transformation.

Of the major German-language political science journals, the Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft and the Politische Vierteljahresschrift, for example, are available for the most part in open access (to date only as hybrid journals) as part of the DEAL agreement with Springer Nature. Other key German-language political science journals, such as the Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen and the Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen, have also been published only as hybrid open access to date – that is, they offer authors the option of "buying the freedom" of individual articles (i.e., making them open access) by paying an article processing charge (APC).

A special role is played by the think tanks in the area of application-oriented political science. Think tanks are public or private institutions that analyse foreign policy processes. They focus mainly on concrete options for action for policy makers, while also aiming to influence the political public at large. Many current publications from the leading think tanks, such as Clingendael in the Netherlands, the German Institute for International and Security Affairs and the Center for Applied Policy Research in Germany, and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in Sweden, are for the most part freely accessible, albeit not completely open access. They are well publicised and can be downloaded easily from the respective websites.

On the other hand, the problem with this type of grey literature is its findability at the usual search venues and the long-term digital availability of its content.

As of August 2024, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) listed 3,033 titles under the search term "political science", and the OAPEN Library listed around 8,602 titles under the search term "political science".

In the case of political science monographs and edited volumes, open access is becoming increasingly widespread. At Taylor & Francis/Routledge, for example, the share of open access books in the section “Politics & International Relations” recently stood at just over 8%. At Springer Nature/Palgrave, a sample of titles in the collection "Political Science and International Studies" for the most recent publication years yielded an open access share of 9.4%. At Nomos Publishing, one of the leading academic publishers for political science in the German-speaking area, the share of open access works among new political science titles between 2020 and May 2024 was 12.6%.

By now, all major publishers (including German publishers) offer an open access option, with the result that, at the publishers of relevance to political science, more and more books are available in open access. The publication costs are financed (possibly pro rata) from project funding and through institutional sources such as publication funds or crowdfunding, as is the case with the transcript Open Library Politikwissenschaft, which is supported by the Specialized Information Service Political Science – Pollux (Hanneken et al., 2020).

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