So, you know that you want to launch a journal—but you’re not sure if you want to publish science or humanities papers.
This can be a very challenging question to answer. In some ways, there are simple answers. But sometimes those simple answers come from simple places. People are complicated and motivations aren’t always straightforward. Here’s an example, let’s say that your goal is to “serve an underrepresented field in academia”.
This feels like a noble goal. And there might be a lot of reasons why you’d want to do this. Perhaps you feel that all academic fields need to be better represented, and you want to make sure that voices that normally wouldn’t be heard can be amplified. But what if that meant that you would make 75% less profit as a company? Or that it meant that your projected growth might take several years longer? Noble goal, perhaps, but also not the best business advice.
Finding the right position might be challenging, and there are lots of things to consider.
Science vs. Humanities—which should you pick?
In many ways, this question dictates all the decisions that you will need to make as a business. What conferences will you participate in? How will you reach out to prospective authors and editorial board members? What does the field look like presently?
Both of these areas of academia have very different environments. The ways they operate are different. Even the amount of funding available to these different branches of academia are vastly different.
Generally, the “hard sciences” are much better funded and this is better represented by the number of journals that are available to publish in. In addition, most of the really famous journals tend to be based on sciences. This means that it might be easier to make money in this particular area, but that there will be significantly more competition. Being successful in this sort of environment will require a lot of effort.
The humanities, however, tends to have less competition (possibly for the aforementioned reason). There is less money in this area of academia, but that doesn’t mean “none”. There are many journals which deal with humanities, and are successful, but where their income streams come from might be slightly different.
Neither is “better” than the other, only different.
How important is money?
At the end of the day, when it comes to science vs. humanities, the decision might boil down to money. Because sciences are generally better funded, the amount of money available to authors tends to be greater than money available to authors in, for example, a literature department. This means that you may need to adjust the prices of your services accordingly if you’re going to focus on the humanities.
For example, let’s use a symbolic representation. Let’s say that publishing a science journal makes you a hundred dollars. But publishing a humanities journal makes you fifty dollars. You need to either publish twice as many papers to make the same amount of money. But there are other options. You could seek out funding from other sources. This is why setting up a journal requires a great deal of research.
Ways to supplement a lower income from your journal
Your journal does not need to limit itself by providing certain services to only your authors. Even though the science vs. humanities question is a good one, both of them do need certain types of services. Even if your journal, for example, layout services or English editing services are ways in which you can supplement your journal’s income. There are also many different programs for small businesses that might be able to help in your initial years while your journal gets established.
Are sciences or humanities more important to you?
Money matters in the grand scheme of things—you need to pay rent, salaries, and more. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t make money doing what you believe is important. If you believe that creating an outlet for humanities content, or fine arts, or music, or any number of other fields. Perhaps you want to produce a journal about international law or philosophy. Whatever your goals are, they aren’t impossible. But because some of these fields simply are smaller than something like like “biology” or “physics”, it might be more of an uphill climb to start.
This doesn’t mean that it is impossible, and there are certainly strong and established journals that deal with humanities, but there are simply fewer than of “the hard sciences”.
Many people who get into the field of academic publishing do so because they want to support a specific discipline. And because of this, people tend to be passionate about the subject matter they work with. This sometimes means that you aren’t going to be on a fast track to get rich quick.
But whatever choice you make, make sure that you plan carefully and establish good guidelines for your journal.