Prestige, praktik, och öppen publicering : En kvalitativ intervjustudie om humanioradoktorander och publicering

Sammanfattning: The publishing landscape has undergone significant transformation in the last years facing and implementing open science policies, including principles for open access (OA). However, certain challenges have been identified in OA-publishing for different scientific fields, such as the humanities, depending on the norms and traditions for how to conduct research and how to publish. The topic of this thesis is the new researchers now entering this research field, i.e. doctoral students, and how they perceive and experience publishing. Therefore, the thesis aimed to contribute more knowledge about doctoral students’ views on scientific publishing and open access within the field of the humanities. Seven qualitative, semi-structured interviews were conducted with Swedish doctoral students to explore this topic. The theoretical approach used in the thesis was practice theory and Karin Knorr Cetina’s concept of epistemic cultures – taking the perspective that social life is ordered through practices and that each scientific field has its own culture of practices surrounding research and publishing. The study found that supervisors and colleagues shaped the choices doctoral students made in publishing to a high degree. Furthermore, depending on how the students related to different aspects of publishing practices they made certain strategic choices. Visibility was the most important factor in publishing, first and foremost in the form of publishing in a prestigious journal within the student’s own field. Lastly, the study concluded that open access-publishing has become the norm even within the humanities field, at least for article-publishing. The doctoral students experienced no conflict between how they publish within their field and open access. Overall, the respondents had a positive view of OA. However, they would only choose OA if it was easy to do, and it was not the first priority for most respondents.