Berlin Independent Council for Social Sciences — in formation
Five companies publish 70% of the social science that gets indexed. Meanwhile most of the world's social science journals are run by universities and scholarly societies rather than companies, and the indices barely see them. The result is a literature that mistakes a fraction of itself for the whole — and everyone who reads it is reading that fraction, in Berlin as much as anywhere else.
70%
of social science papers come from the five largest publishers — the highest concentration of any field. The humanities sit at 20%. The natural sciences fall in between, and the reason is instructive: chemistry and physics kept their own scholarly societies publishing their own journals. Social science never built them.
Larivière, Haustein & Mongeon 2015, PLOS ONE12%
of journals in Türkiye are published by commercial publishers. In Poland it is 8%. Across Latin America, universities publish the majority. This scholarship is already independent and already peer-reviewed. Web of Science and Scopus index only a small portion of it.
Kulczycki et al. 2026, Journal of Data and Information Science$1.06bn
was paid in article processing charges to the five largest publishers between 2015 and 2018 alone. Open access did not dissolve the oligopoly; it gave it a second revenue model, and moved the bill from readers to authors.
Butler et al. 2023, Quantitative Science StudiesNone of these numbers are ours. They are peer-reviewed, published, and linked. Check them.
People leave their small circles and reach for the universal. That is the whole of it, and it is harder than it sounds, because every scholarly world is a small circle that has quietly mistaken itself for the world. The Anglophone one is simply the circle that got to call itself international.
So this is not a complaint about publishers, and it is not an appeal on behalf of anyone's periphery. Charity is just the same map drawn again, with the centre being generous. The claim is plainer and it implicates all of us: a literature assembled from one fraction of the work is a worse literature, and the person reading it in Berlin is as poorly served as the person unread in Kraków.
What BICSS is today is an idea trying to organise itself on the internet. There is no legal personality, no office and nothing published. The goal is to build what social science skipped, the scholarly society it never had: journals, a congress, a book programme, owned by their members rather than by shareholders. That is why we are aiming at a registered cooperative seated in Berlin rather than a company. All of it comes later and in that order, and we are not going to pretend otherwise on a website.
We should say the obvious thing about ourselves too. The people starting this are mostly from one country, because that is who the founder knows, and that is exactly the mechanism we just described. Founding groups form through strong ties and similarity, and good intentions have been measured against it and lost. So we are not relying on our intentions. We are writing rules, now, while they cost us nothing.
Written into the founding documents before there is anyone to inconvenience. They will do their real work on the day they say no to someone we want.
The BICSS Seminar — first series
We are programming a monthly online seminar in the social sciences, and we are opening it rather than inviting our friends. Send us an abstract. We will read it, and we will choose on what it says, because choosing on who we already know is how organisations end up looking like their founders.
No institutional affiliation is required. No career stage is required. If you are a doctoral student with a good argument, you qualify. We are especially interested in work published in venues the major indices do not cover, and in research on the social sciences themselves — how they are evaluated, published, funded and read.
Send an abstractThis opens your email programme. We run no web form, so this site collects nothing about you.
An idea organising itself online. That is an accurate description and we would rather use it than a grander one. There is no registered legal entity, no premises and nothing published yet.
The goal is registration as a Genossenschaft — a cooperative under German law, owned one member one vote — with its seat in Berlin. That is an intention. Stating an intention is not the same as having arrived, and we would rather say so than blur it.
There are no names on this page because there is not yet a council to name, and a list of people who have merely agreed with something is not a council. The seminar comes first. The people who show up to it are how this gets built, and when there are names they will be here.