Open Access - Once more different - On the scientific publishing in the liberal arts

The publication culture of the hermeneutically driven social sciences and humanities (SSH) differs significantly from that of the hard sciences with respect both to publication formats and to the relationship between carrier formats to content. An additional requirement of the SSH is the availability of open source material as a basis for both the production and reception of its results. In as much as the reimplementation of complex SSH publication formats represents a challenging long-term task, the short-term open access agenda in the field of SSH is more likely to be concerned with demands for barrier-free access to technically transparent source material.