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.
