Abstract:

For sociology and sociologists, scientific journals have only continued to grow in importance in recent decades. The process of double-blind peer review is designed to ensure scientific quality standards, and publishing in international peer-reviewed journals is considered crucial for career advancement in academia.

With the digitalization of publishing and the rise of the open science movement, open access (OA) publications have also gained in importance. Many research funding organizations now require research projects to publish their results OA. In addition, research has shown that OA publications have a higher impact. As a result, scholarly publishing is undergoing a transition to OA. More and more journals are making all their articles OA, which is called Gold Open Access (GOA) – entirely free for readers, but with potential costs for authors.

In the past, articles were published behind a paywall and could only be accessed if readers paid a subscription fee. Now, many journals publish their articles openly, but the authors themselves have to pay an article processing charge (APC). There is an ongoing process of concentration by which journals are increasingly becoming part of the portfolios of a small number of large publishers, increasing the power of the publishers. This has resulted in – among other things – quite substantial APCs, often four figure sums.

In Germany, after lengthy negotiations, the long-standing subscription model has recently been replaced by the DEAL agreement between several major publishers (Springer Nature, Wiley and Elsevier) and an alliance of German scientific organizations. Universities and other institutions which have signed up to DEAL provide researchers with free access to the full texts of a large number of journals. The APCs are passed on to the universities and, in some cases, to the researchers as the authors of the publications. Thus, the status quo is that scientists edit, review, and write articles for free. Then, depending on their university’s policy, they may have to pay the frequently high APCs if their articles are published. At the same time, the publishers make a profit.

This situation has led to increasing calls for researchers to work with libraries and non-commercial publishers to operate journals with Diamond Open Access (DOA) themselves: Going even further than GOA, this model involves articles being published, distributed, and preserved with no fees for either readers or authors.

These developments give rise to numerous pressing questions: How successful and fair are the DEAL contracts and what future do they have? How precarious is the situation for journals which are neither DEAL members nor OA? How does sociology compare with other disciplines in terms of its publication models? What are the prospects and hurdles facing those established subscription or hybrid journals which are committed to transitioning to DOA? What are the challenges and advantages of newly founded DOA journals? What do you need to bear in mind if you want to set up such a journal?