Mónika Rusvai is a research assistant at the Department of Science Policy and Scientometrics in the Library and Information Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She is engaged in the scientometric analysis of social sciences and humanities (SSH), with special focus on the difficulties of mapping the structure of this field and on the possibilities of creating an SSH-specific metrics. Her published articles discuss the hardships of research evaluation within the SSH. Her background links her to the humanities: she owns a BA and an MA degree in English literature, and she is currently working on a doctoral thesis on contemporary English speculative fiction.

Chapter XXXIX of Focus on Open Science: Budapest

Presentation: Interactions of Open Access and the Humanities – Evidence from Hungary

Open Access (OA) is a rapidly evolving publication model that fuels the democratization of global science by offering a broader platform for research communication. Within the European Union, multiple initiatives have formulated the intention to open up scholarly communication for a wider audience. However, the success of these initiatives comes down to researchers’ underlying perceptions, motivations and behaviours regarding OA publishing. The present study follows in these lines and addresses OA attitudes within the humanities in Hungary. The perceptions of this publication model has been scarcely analysed among humanities scholars on an international level, and never before in Hungary. Our research covers two perspectives regarding OA attitudes: we conducted interviews with publishers that offer significant OA publishing possibilities for scholars in the humanities and recorded focus group discussions with researchers. Transcripts were processed and coded, then subjected to discourse network analysis. The project strives for a multidimensional outcome that includes both the scholarly community’s evidence-based, aggregated landscape of attitudes and a detailed picture of the field’s internal structure. A systematic analysis of interactions of OA and the humanities is yet unparalleled in Hungary, therefore our findings will hopefully influence future policy-making.