Gender Studies

Gender studies is a scientific field that is characterised by both disciplinarity and transdisciplinarity. Publishing practices and venues depend on the disciplines involved and are correspondingly heterogeneous. They are often shaped by the practices in the social sciences and humanities.

In gender studies, engagement with open access publishing models proceeded hesitantly at first. Today, however, the opportunities afforded by electronic publishing are being increasingly recognised. There are now a number of open access publications in German-language gender studies – especially among journals. There has also been a gradual increase in the number of open access publications in the area of books. Internationally, two developments can be distinguished. On the one hand, relevant, mainly English-language publications on gender studies are published with large commercial publishers that, to date, unfortunately offer only hybrid open access options against payment of article processing charges (APCs). On the other hand, there are a growing number of open access publications in the non-English-speaking world that use no-fee o­pen access models, thereby making an important contribution to bibliodiversity.

The German Gender Studies Association (Fachgesellschaft Geschlechterstu­dien) actively supports open access publishing. As one of the four editors of the Open Gender Journal, and as the provider of the Open Gender Platform, the association has anchored open access as an important field of activity in its task spectrum. In addition, within the association, the working group Open Digital Gender connects existing initiatives and engages with current developments in the areas of open access and open science.

Open access publishing offers enormous opportunities, especially for gender studies. Because of political reservations with regard to gender studies, and the ambiguous location of the field between the disciplines, its results are subjected to reception barriers. The potentially greater visibility and the direct access to full texts enables open access publications to overcome these barriers and thus demonstrate their quality.

With GenderOpen, which was established in 2018, gender studies has a discip­linary open access repository that ensures the long-term availability of publica­tions under open access conditions. The repository informs authors about their self-archiving rights, thereby creating an awareness of the possibilities granted to them under German copyright law. Targeted collaborations with relevant specialist publishers enable in many cases the self-archiving of the original publisher’s version and the corresponding metadata after expiry of an embargo period.

The GenderOpen keyword index, Schlagwortindex GenderOpen, is a controlled vocabulary for the substantive description of gender studies publications. Deve­loped within the framework of GenderOpen, it is also used by several journals, the Digital German Women’s Archive (Digitales Deutsches Frauenarchiv, DDF), and the reviewers database Gutachter*innen-Datenbank. In 2019, GenderOpen received the DINI Certificate for Open Access Publication Services. An overview of relevant repositories is also provided by the Open Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR).

The topic of open research data is being taken up only hesitantly in gender stu­dies. According to a needs analysis on research data infrastructure in gender studies, only a few researchers have experience of the reuse of research data. The difficulties in disciplinarily classifying gender studies repeat themselves also in relation to open research data. To date, there are no explicitly designated re­search repositories for gender studies. Even when metadata have been properly recorded, a search always requires the use of various search strategies with different storage locations, keywords, and disciplines. However, whether an independent storage location for open research data is called for in an inter- and transdisciplinary field such as gender studies, in which researchers work with diverse types of data, has not yet been conclusively settled.