Open Access Mind Map

DFG project EthnOA - Open Access in the ethnological disciplines

The project designs and analyses open access infrastructures.
Open Access Mind Map
Image: Sarah Thanner
This page has been machine translated.

Open accessExternal link - meaning the free public provision of scientific publications for free reuse - is increasingly becoming the predominant form of publication. According to the Open Access MonitorExternal link, almost 63 per cent of journal articles in all disciplines in Germany were published in open access in 2019-2023 (as of November 2023). Institutions such as the German Research FoundationExternal link and the German Council of Science and HumanitiesExternal link strongly recommend the transformation to open access publishing.

There is also a great willingness to publish in open access in the ethnological disciplines, including empirical cultural studies and social and cultural anthropology.

There are good reasons for this: Open access not only increases the visibility and discoverability of publications, it also improves access to and the participation of research partners in published materials. Open access thus promotes decolonisation and dehierarchisation in the publication process, enables free access to and participation in scientific knowledge and also keeps early career researchers in mind.

At the same time, open access also challenges social and cultural science disciplines to critically and reflectively examine their own research practices, for example with regard to informed consent or the anonymisation of data and identities of our research partners. Regardless of whether the publication is open or closed access, digital formats that circulate on the internet pose different methodological challenges than purely analogue formats. And last but not least, the progressive expansion of open access infrastructures also raises the question of how digital technologies and processes influence the handling of academic knowledge and help shape the sociomateriality of screen-based reading experiences.

The project EthnOA - Open Access in the ethnological disciplines accompanies and promotes the change in publication culture that is already taking place in the ethnological disciplines. EthnOA supports open accessExternal link in both the golden and the green road, creates sustainable structures for an ongoing dialogue on the opportunities and challenges of open access and supports learned societies, journal editors and researchers. In this way, EthnOA aims to contribute to the development of sustainable and critically-reflected open access infrastructures and to examine the topic of open access from an ethnographic perspective.

 

Project managers at the FSU Jena

PD Dr Anne Dippel (project leader), anne.dippel@uni-jena.de

Sarah Thanner, M.A., M.A. (research assistant), sarah.thanner@uni-jena.de

Marlen Lutter, B.A. (student assistant), marlen.lutter@uni-jena.de

  • Other project participants

    Prof Dr Gabriele Alex, University of Tübingen

    Matthias HarbeckExternal link, FID SKA, University Library HU Berlin,

    Dr Kathleen HeftExternal link, FID SKA, HU Berlin University Library

    PD Dr Ehler VossExternal link, University of Bremen

  • Advisory service(s)|consultations, training course and support from EthnOA

    EthnOA supports the development and expansion of competences and support structures for open access publishing in the ethnological disciplines and offers: (1) training course|training sessions and advisory services(s)|consultations on the topic of open access, (2) support for researchers in the secondary publication of their publications in the Green Way; (3) networking and support for learned societies and journal editors in the transformation to open access.

    Using the example of the transformation of three central anthropological journals - the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie/Journal for Social and Cultural AnthropologyExternal link, ZfE/JSCA, the Zeitschrift für Empirische KulturwissenschaftExternal link, ZEKW, and the Curare - Zeitschrift für Medizinethnologie/Journal of Medical AnthropologyExternal link - the Golden Road to Open Access publishing is being implemented in partnership with the respective publishers.

    Would you like to publish on the EthnOA Open Access publication server?

    The EthnOA publication server is also open to researchers in the (subject) area|field of social and cultural anthropology who do not have an affiliation with an institution or access to an institutional repository. Follow this linkExternal link for more information.

    Do you need advisory services(s)|consultations on the topic of secondary publication in the Green Way?

    EthnOA supports you in exercising your secondary publication rights and also provides advice on the topic of transferring rights in the context of planned publications. Please contact us with any questions:

    Dr Kathleen Heft (EthnOA project coordinator)

    Phone: +49 30 2093-99266
    E-mail: kathleen.heft[at]ub.hu-berlin.de

    EthnOA is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) over a period of three years as part of the Infrastructures for Scholarly Publishing funding programme.
    Status: March 2024