Open Access (OA) has been particularly effectively introduced as a publication model within the field of science, technology and medicine (STM), where its benefits are widely recognised (cf. Suber 2012, pp. 29 ff.). By way of contrast, it seems that the humanities and social sciences tend to exhibit a greater degree of reticence. OA endeavours in this area are also a constant object of criticism. Within the field of vocational education and training (VET) research, the supposition is that scepticism and uncertainty are more prevalent because the status of knowledge regarding the topic of OA is lower. This particularly applies in respect of questions relating to quality standards, usual financing models and licensing. These assessments have their basis in the attitudes expressed and the controversial discussions that took place in the wake of a feasibility study conducted into the setting up of a repository at the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training, BIBB (“Repository at BIBB – clarification of possible options, particularly with regard to funding by the German Research Foundation”, Organisational Development Project 9.5.501). In order to further the establishment of the OA publication model in vocational education and training research, it is therefore important to investigate the conditions, which exert an influence on the acceptance, dissemination, and use of OA.
The BIBB research project “Open Access in vocational education and training research”, which launched in 2018 and is scheduled to run until 2020, is investigating the technical, structural, policy-related, normative and inherent academic research conditions that affect the acceptance, dissemination and use of OA from the perspective of authors involved in the field of vocational education and training research. The research project will focus on German-speaking countries. Because VET research represents an interlinking of various related academic disciplines rather than comprising a stand-alone discipline, the assumption is that the results of the project will be partially transferable to other fields within the social sciences and the humanities and will thus contribute towards findings regarding OA across the whole of the latter domain. The project will be supported by a project council and will be carried out by Mr. Rödel, Ms. Langenkamp, Ms. Taufenbach, Ms. Weiland and Ms. Getz in accordance with the principles of Open Science. All texts, methods, (raw) data, evaluations, questionnaires etc. will be published on a project homepage in line with the stipulations of the Data Protection Act. In order to permit networking to take place with members of the general public who are interested in the work, the project homepage will provide a facility for feedback.
The background to the research project is underpinned by the sociology of science and by media theory. These encompass knowledge of the academic research publication system and its various publication models. The research project takes its lead from previous investigations conducted in the humanities and social sciences by Ulrich Herb (2015) and Doris Bambey (2016) and from the “Study of Open Access Publishing” (SOAP). These are used in the research project alongside the sociology of science and media theory as a foundation to identify, describe and reflect upon developments in the field of Open Access. A further aim is to deploy the sociology of science as a vehicle for an understanding of the economic relevance of knowledge and of academic research and to present sequences of academic research communication and publication systems varying along disciplines. These form the context for the research issue centring on the conditions governing the acceptance, dissemination and use of Open Access and for the derivation of a possible feature space in accordance with technical, structural, policy-related, normative and inherent academic research conditions.
