English and American Studies

As of May 2025, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listed 92 entries under the keywords “Language and Literature: English language”, 61 entries under “Language and Literature: English literature”, 20 entries under “Language and Literature: American literature”, 4 entries under “History of Great Britain”, 9 entries under “History America: America”, 2 entries under “History America: United States” and 3 entries under “History America: United States local history”.

The subject classification in the DOAJ is not always precise. Some of the journals of relevance to English and American Studies are to be found under more general categories, such as Language and Literature. In the case of specific research interests, it is therefore worthwhile to use free search terms. There are also several high-quality journals that are not yet listed in the DOAJ. The numbers mentioned above are thus only reference values. 

Important open access journals include:

• Anglistik
• Journal for the Study of British Cultures
• Amerikastudien / American Studies
• New American Studies Journal: A Forum
• European Journal for American Studies
• Zeitschrift für Australienstudien/Australian Studies Journal
• Canada and Beyond European Journal of American Studies
• Review of Irish Studies in Europe
• Journal of Transnational American Studies 
• On Culture
• Postcolonial Text
• Transformative Works and Cultures

Many journals that for a long time were available only in printed form have retained the classic subscription model without an open access component for their (mainly additional) digital editions. A welcome tendency when transitioning from a print to a digital version can be observed in the case of the journals of the main professional associations (e.g., the German Association for the Study of English, the German Association for American Studies, and the German Association for Australian Studies), almost all of which are now (additionally) available in open access. Some of these journals are still published by scholarly publishers, whereas others are published via the associations’ websites. By contrast, the journal of the European Association of American Studies, for example, has been published in open access since its foundation.

On the other hand, some e-journals were successfully implemented at an early stage as scholar-led publications without the support of publishers. Besides free worldwide access, in particular the potential of web-based publishing (hyperlinks, integration of images and audio-visual sources) was recognised. These journals include, for example: in Germany, Erfurt Electronic Studies in English (1995–2011) and the American Studies Journal (since 1996); in the United Kingdom, Early Modern Literary Studies (since 1995); and in Canada, Romanticism on the Net (RoN) (since 1996). Open access is now also an established model among journals edited by early career researchers. The articles of the journals Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies (COPAS) (since 2000) and aspeers: emerging voices in american studies (dual-publishing model since 2008) have been published under a Creative Commons (CC) licence from the very beginning.

The most important repositories for English and American Studies include:

• The Stacks, an interdisciplinary repository for the following disciplines: American Studies, English Studies, Anglophone postcolonial studies, Australian and New Zealand Studies, British and Irish Studies, and Canadian Studies, including all sub-fields. The repository is provided by the Specialised Information Service (SIS) Anglo-American Culture and is operated by Göttingen State and University Library. Besides self-archiving their publications (journal articles and monographs), scholars can also deposit previously unpublished works, for example conference papers, teaching materials, and conference programmes. All documents are made available in open access either immediately or after a freely selectable embargo period. The repository was awarded the current version of the DINI Certificate in 2021. 
• Humanities Commons (CORE), an interdisciplinary open access repository for the humanities, which is operated inter alia by the Modern Language Association (MLA). Its holdings also include grey literature (teaching materials, conference papers). 
• GenderOpen, a disciplinary repository for gender studies operated by the Margherita von Brentano Center for Gender Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, the Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Women and Gender at Technische Universität Berlin.
• media/rep/, a disciplinary repository for media studies and neighbouring disciplines, which is operated by the Institute for Media Studies in cooperation with Marburg University Library.
• CompaRe, a repository for comparative literature, which is maintained by the Specialised Information Service Comparative Literature. 

An overview of relevant repositories is provided by the Open Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR). The English Language and Literature Commons section of the database Digital Commons Network lists full-text articles from institutional repositories worldwide (with a focus on US institutions).

Major open science initiatives, for example the German association Geistes- und kulturwissenschaftliche Forschungsinfrastrukturen e.V, are not usually discipline-specific, but rather are addressed to the humanities as a whole. Here, the term open science refers primarily to providing access to digital materials (historical sources, literary texts, language corpora) and preparing (mostly text-based) research data using digital tools and making them available in the long term (e.g., in the DARIAH-DE Repository).

Especially in research areas in which the object of research includes not only texts but also audiovisual sources, pioneer projects were conducted at an early stage on the Internet to benefit from the opportunities afforded by hypermedia and to enable free access and – especially also interdisciplinary – reusability. For example, the Rossetti Archive and the Victorian Web date back to the 1990s. Recent major edition projects include, for example, the Walt Whitman Archive and the James Joyce Digital Archive. 

In Germany, scholars in the field of digital humanities, and projects at scholarly libraries in particular, are forging new paths. So far, the anchoring of open science in the main professional associations has only partially been implemented, for example by the Digital American Studies Initiative (DASI), a working group within the German Association for American Studies that organises, among other things, thematic discussion forums at the annual conferences. 

Potential for a central strategy for dealing with language- and text-based research data currently also lies in the humanities consortia (e.g., Text+) within the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI).