For Researchers in the Humanities, Is Open Really Fair?

The open research movement is suffused with good faith in science and society. This good faith arises, in part, from (self-)regulated scientific practices that abide by Robert K. Merton’s norms: universalism, communalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism (1942). That scientists strive for truth and knowledge, not ego, rank, or profit is a noble ideal. Openness is celebrated because knowledge is perceived as a public good. Open research practices are also recognized as a tool to battle the reproducibility crisis, the peer review crisis, and the profiteering of some commercial publishers.

In the open movement, openness and open research practices are often presented as inclusive of all disciplines. For instance, the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science (2021) claims that open science encompasses “basic and applied sciences, natural and social sciences and the humanities,” and that it “builds on the following key pillars: open scientific knowledge, open science infrastructures, science communication, open engagement of societal actors and open dialogue with other knowledge systems.” But despite the good will and well-intentioned principles of the open movement, humanities scholars and researchers often have a different experience of open research and its practices (research data management plans, open access policies, funding mandates).

Over the past year, we interviewed 39 researchers in the humanities about their understanding and practices of open research. One significant finding: While they agreed, in principle, that openness is a good thing, they felt that making open research an instrument of research evaluation (i.e., open is good and not open is bad) would put them in a fragile position, as their research and publication practices do not always fit neatly onto open research templates—for example, those governing date reuse and interoperability.

Because open research mandates and requirements largely stem from scientific practices, humanities researchers also have a heightened sense of being marginalized or discriminated against. Our subjects expressed an omnipresent fear that the position of the humanities in the wider system of knowledge production could be further weakened, especially when reports of funding cuts in humanities programs are accumulating at accelerating rates (see, for example, Townsend, 2024; Australian Academy of the Humanities, 2020; Higher Education Policy Institute, 2023). They also reported concern about resource imbalances between institutions, which could lead to further stratification rather than leveling the playing field because, for now, the mainstream way to achieve openness comes at high costs.

Humanities researchers are right to be worried. Anyone who is serious about the values of the open movement should want to understand their perspective.

APCs, BPCs, and the Matthew Effect

An unintended consequence of the open access movement—initiated in the 1990s—is the market for article-processing charges (APCs) levied by predatory and reputable journals alike. In recent years, these charges have increased at a rate higher than inflation and have sometimes seemed to be correlated to the established prestige or impact factor of a journal. The push for openness prompted transformative agreements (also known as transitional or read-and-publish agreements), which can only be afforded by institutions with means. Open access has thus become a mechanism by which the affluent have more say and reach than the under-resourced, deepening the “North/South” divide and making only more urgent the subject of global inequities in knowledge production (Beigel, 2021; Nabyonga-Orem et al., 2020; Raju & Badrudeen, 2022).

Open access will not level the playing field until every researcher has equal opportunities to read and publish. What is more, global divide is not the only driver of the stratification of knowledge production; we must also look into the dynamics between, and within, knowledge domains. For example, humanities researchers tend to be funded less often than others, and when they are funded, the amount is significantly less (Newfield, 2025), resulting in a higher dependency on institutional support, whether subsidized APCs or assistance in developing non-commercial, scholar-led journals, to make their publications open access.

A similar dynamic plays out in book publishing, where the mainstream funding mechanism, book processing charges (BPCs), are—just like APCs—prohibitive for many. For example, fees for OA monographs and collected volumes at De Gruyter Brill start at about £6,000; Cambridge University Press charges a BPC of £9,500 to publish an OA monograph of up to 120,000 words; at Taylor & Francis, prices for a standard full monograph start from £10,000 and from £5,000 for a standard shortform of books between 25–50,000 words). Although there have been initiatives to support diamond open access books (like the Open Book Collective), their capacity is, so far, limited. Meanwhile, some presses offer special arrangements for researchers from their own universities (for example, DCU Press) or member institutions (for example, Scottish Universities Press). Varying investment in open research infrastructure means that researchers in some institutions or regions can make their work open access, while those affiliated with institutions and regions that are not interested in, or do not have the resources to support, book publishing are left behind. Here we see Merton’s Matthew effect—which “may serve to heighten the visibility of contributions to science by scientists of acknowledged standing and to reduce the visibility of contributions by authors who are less well known” (1968, p. 62)—in action.

It is important to note that the humanities researchers we interviewed did not object to open access itself. But they did observe the possible consequences of inequities and stratification within their knowledge domains due to APCs, BPCs, and discrepancies in institutional support. Moreover, they fear that open access requirements, if not properly supported, could make the humanities look backward and reserved, leading to further cuts and marginalization when research and educational programs in the humanities have already been hardest hit by redundancy and closure over the last decade. The number of open access publications in the sciences and the social sciences certainly dwarfs the number in the humanities, which can create the illusion that humanities research is less open, less productive, and less deserving of future funding—even though open research mandates and requirements arrived in the humanities packaged alongside scientific practices and norms and ill-disposed to the notion that humanities researchers might have different ideas about open research. Among these researchers, there is a sense that when it comes to open research mandates and requirements, humanities research is an afterthought—which is neither fair nor just.

Conclusion

In response to the turmoil in research institutions and universities stirred by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the United States, Holden Thorp, the editor in chief of Science recently wrote, “Scientific knowledge is, fortunately, a public good, and as such, its benefits transcend boundaries” (2025).

Both the idea and the ideal of open research are more important now than ever. There is no question that openness is a condition for the free flow of information and international collaboration. Open access and open research, however, are not independent of science as an institution. The reward system has not changed radically since Merton’s work on the sociology of science (1973), and it seems clear that gold access models are exacerbating the Matthew effect—not only at individual, institutional, and regional levels, but also within and between knowledge domains.

Open access and open research practices should be sensitive to epistemic culture, infrastructure, and funding support. Humanities research is already battling for survival. If open research is used as a policy instrument or performance criterion without input from those it affects, it can create and propagate, rather than reduce and eradicate, inequities in knowledge production.

References

Townsend, R. (2024). The state(s) of the humanities. American Academy of Arts & Sciences. https://www.amacad.org/bulletin/winter-2024/states-of-the-humanities

Australian Academy of the Humanities. (2020). Humanities hit hardest when needed more than ever. https://humanities.org.au/power-of-the-humanities/humanities-hit-hardest-when-needed-more-than-ever

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Higher Education Policy Institute. (2023, March 29). Humanities education is a UK strength: New report shows it is a mistake to set up a humanities vs STEM contest. https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2023/03/30/humanities-education-is-a-uk-strength-new-report-shows-it-is-a-mistake-to-set-up-a-humanities-vs-stem-contest

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Merton, R. K. (1973). The sociology of science: Theoretical and empirical investigations. The University of Chicago Press.

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Newfield, C. (2025). Humanities decline in darkness: How humanities research funding works. Public Humanities, 1, e31. https://doi.org/10.1017/pub.2024.39

Raju, R., & Badrudeen, A. (2022). How Africa is overcoming ‘knowledge colonialism.’360info.https://doi.org/10.54377/bb4a-d608

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