This post was co-authored by Karin Wulf and Simon Newman, Sir Denis Brogan Professor of American History at the University of Glasgow; Vice President of the Royal Historical Society (RHS) for Publications; co-editor of the RHS’s New Historical Perspectives Open Access monograph series. It originally appeared on the Scholarly Kitchen blog.

“One of the most important lessons of the debates and policy shifts around Open Access (OA) has been the hard-won recognition that no one size fits all.  In particular, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) and HSS (Humanities and Social Sciences) not only have very different requirements and practices, but individual disciplines and fields within disciplines have distinctive research and publication needs. An obvious case was made by art historians who noted that rigid OA requirements would be disastrous for their publication of images that often require specific permissions and licensing. In the arts and humanities we do not own much of the data utilized in our articles, and we can’t license OA to our publications without the consent of multiple rights-owners. The point is valid for any number of scholarly fields in favor of different paths to openness and accessibility…” [read the full post on Scholarly Kitchen here]

Our thanks to Scholarly Kitchen for kindly agreeing to let us repost this snippet from their blog.