Media Studies

The field of media studies deals with the theory, history, and aesthetics of media and media systems. In Germany, media studies as a domain of cultural studies developed in the 1970s especially in the fertile soil of German literary studies, but it also borrowed concepts and methods from theatre studies, art history, and philosophy. While film studies is sometimes an integral part of stu­dy programmes in media studies, it is also offered as a degree programme in its own right. Media studies differs from the social-science and empirically oriented domains of journalism and communication studies, although overlaps may occur in some institutes and study programmes.

In media studies, as in most disciplines in the humanities and cultural sciences, it is only in recent years that the switch to open access has begun on a broad front. One reason for this lies in the publishing culture in media sciences, where monographs and edited collections still play an important role. The reputation of the publisher is an important criterion for publishing activities in media science. By contrast, bibliometric indicators, such as the Journal Impact Factor, play only a comparatively minor role. In recent years, publishers have signifi­cantly increased their commitment to open access, with the result that nume­rous gold and green open access options are available to authors.

The German Society for Media Studies’ (Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft, GfM) journal, Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft (ZfM), has been published open access with the publishing house transcript since 2017. By flipping its jour­nal to open access, the GfM sent an important signal. A further milestone was the es­tablishment in 2018 of the open access repository for media studies media/rep/, which is located at the University of Marburg. In the same year, the GfM established the scholarly interest group (SIG) Open Media Studies and a blog of the same name. 

As of March 2024, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) listed 932 titles under Media studies; in the OAPEN Library, 891 titles were listed in the category of media studies. In addition, there are categories that are of relevance especially for film studies, such as Film theory & criticism, Film, TV & radio, and Films, cinema, in which a total of 612 titles were listed in DOAB and 464 titles were listed in these categories in the OAPEN Library as of March 2024.

The most important German publishers that publish media studies titles in open access include De Gruyter, Springer, transcript and Schüren. The publisher meson press, which grew out of a project at the University of Lüneburg, publishes only open access books.

The following series make a number of their titles available in open access:

• Cinepoetics – Poetologien audiovisueller Bilder
• Medien'Welten – Braunschweiger Schriften zur Medienkultur
• Medien – Wissen – Bildung
• Zürcher Filmstudien

In 2021, within the framework of a project on the open access transition, which was funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the publishing house transcript established the Open Library Medienwissenschaft in collaboration with the specialised information service for media, film and communication studies adlr.link.

• The specialised information service for media, film and communication studies adlr.link at Leipzig University Library operates the central search portal of the discipline; open access resources are specially labelled. 
• The Open-Media-Studies-Blog offers a public forum for topical debates on open science, open access, openness, and access in media studies and beyond.
• Open Access in Media Studies is a curated website that aims to inform about and promote open access publishing in media studies.
• MediArXiv is a community-led digital archive for media, film, and communi­cation research. It offers media studies scholars a platform to upload their working papers, preprints, post-prints, and published manuscripts.
• The blog filmwissenschaft.umsonst collects and comments on German-language open access publications from the areas of media, film, and television studies.
• Film Studies For Free is a blog that comments on and links to open access resources from the field of film and media studies.
• The online archives JSTOR and Project MUSE now also provide open access content of relevance to media studies.