This paper analyses publication practices in the German-speaking region for two different research communities within educational science: History of Education and Media Education. This will be contrasted with recent developments in Open Access. For some time, the Open Access movement has increasingly requested free research output without restrictions on digital access and use through copyrights and licenses. The main argument is that the outcomes of publicly funded research should be made freely and openly available, and should not support the financial gains of private publishers. A range of declarations have been created which are broadly supported by various research communities. Political-scientific agendas on European (e.g. EC 2017) and national levels (e.g. in Germany: BMBF 2016) have incorporated main requirements of the Open Access movement, which already shape the publication landscape and its practices.

Recently, a profound transformation on a large-scale system level is demanded owing to a change in the current scholarly journals subscription model to Open Access business models (e.g. OA2020 2016a; Schimmer 2017), whereby it is assumed that this transformation should be possible “without added expense” (Schimmer et al. 2015). While the OA2020 Expression of Interest (2016b) encompasses the transformation in “accordance with community-specific publication preferences”, the concrete realization of this adjustment remains uncertain.

Considering these aims at fundamental changes, this paper argues for a detailed account of the situation in educational science and proposes a critical engagement of the research communities. The Open Access movement has mainly been driven and configured by the “serials crisis” in Science, Technology, and Medicine (STM) in the 1990s, which was caused by an oligarchical publishing situation with a focus on scientific journals. To re-configure the established Open Access assemblage to requirements of a community-specific publication landscape, the fabrication, distribution and usage of publications in their networks needs to be comprised. Therefore the publication landscape in educational science, especially in the German-speaking region, is analysed at the example of the two research communities “History of Education” and “Media Education”. Each of those two groups represents the heterogeneities of scientific communities, publication and reception practices as well as a variety of publishers. Additionally, it seems necessary to filter the broad academic discipline of “educational science” to concretely study publication practices of scientific communities.

A number of studies have been realised in the Open Access movement to monitor, discuss, and develop OA strategies (e.g. Piwowar 2017). When studying the publication landscape and its practices – also in educational science – one main twofold obstacle is: the restriction to measurable journals articles and/or the studies’ base on empirical corpora which only encompass journal articles (mostly Web of science: www.webofscience.com or webofknowledge.com, e.g. Schimmer et al. 2015). For educational science, at the least 45 % (GEI/FIS 2017; Dees/Botte 2012, Dees 2008) of the scholarly output in educational science would be excluded and the importance of monographs and collected editions in scholarly communication would be disregarded. This STM- oriented position towards the measurability of academic output contrasts the tradition in educational science, and has certain implications for funding, strategies and infrastructure developments of OA. The special situation of OA monographs has only recently been focused in studies and a few funding agencies have started programs for OA monographs (e.g. Austrian Science Fund - FWF, Leibniz Association in process, Swiss National Science Foundation - SNF). But still, the digital infrastructure to disseminate bibliographical metadata of OA monographs or even collected editions and their articles is not yet as powerful as the dissemination system of OA journals.

This paper is based on a mixed-method approach. It encompasses a literature research and analysis of political-scientific agendas and Open Access studies in respect of educational science and respective particularities. Additionally, the publication landscape and the situation of Open Access are described from different perspectives by analysing a range of corpora in Germany and beyond: a) the Open Access server peDOCS offers two corpora to analyse the creation (stock of OA publications) and the usage (OA usage statistic) of Open Access publications. To analyse the usage of OA publications, access to peDOCs has been monitored since 2007. In 2015, the Open Access Statistic-Service based on the COUNTER-Standard was established. B) The FIS Bildung Literaturdatenbank (German Education Index, GEI) is used as a metadata corpus to describe selected publication output of the German educational scientific communities. Established in 1992 and maintained by 30 partners from German speaking countries, the GEI indexes 919,374 publications (as of January 27, 2018). C) Additionally, OA aggregation services (DOAJ, Base, DOAB, OAPEN-Library) are used to identify on a broad level the OA output in educational science (as of January 27, 2018). A second, more exploratory and qualitative approach focuses on publication practices within the exemplary disciplines “History of Education” and “Media Education” by narratively reconstructing their main channels of scientific communication (e.g. publishers, journals, platforms). This reconstruction will be conducted by interviewing actively leading experts of the respective groups who are familiar with their publication landscape and practices. As the above mentioned repositories and metadata sources are limited, it seems necessary to gain a more detailed picture of concrete and applied publication practices and thus eventually be able to compare the two viewpoints.

The outlined restrictions in the OA debate concerning the publication landscape in educational science affect the situation of publishers. The focus on measurable journal articles, STM and WoS affects only a small number of educational science publications. On the other hand, the publication output of the German speaking research communities documented in GEI/FIS indicates a broad variety of publishers including many small and medium enterprise publishers. Some of the big publishing houses have already adjusted their business models and offer the publication of OA articles in educational science for a certain fee. As it will be shown in this paper, the transformation aggravates the situation of small and medium enterprise publishers, who mostly offer fair publishing prices and have not benefited from the serial crisis. Given a lack of funding for OA monographs, OA digital infrastructural support, concrete business models (for monographs, subscriptions) and engagement of the research communities a realistic but worst case scenario could be a transformation to an OA publication landscape but with an oligarchical market situation dominated by a few publishers with high article prices. While a few Open Access journals of educational research communities have been established, a broad OA debate with a development of an OA strategy for the publication landscape is missing on national and European level. This paper offers first arguments for a clear and differentiated positioning of educational science communities. But a further critical engagement is needed concerning ownership and copyright of publications, transparency in processes, and awareness of financial flows as well as awareness of the maintenance of the publication landscape (e.g. findability, heterogeneity, digital divide). Additionally, we may ask the question whether and which publications and their respective channels spark further academic development or if they are just another piece in one’s individual academic record.

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