A Response to Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies, and the Future
The Open Access movement is often discussed in relation to the sciences only. There are many reasons for the unequal amount of airtime given to the sciences in conversations about open access, including history, time, policy, and cost factors. The earliest, largest-scale open access publishing movement started in physics, where a commitment to sharing work openly via the Internet has persisted since the late 1980s. There is also a sense of urgency when it comes to releasing research results in the sciences, as these results might feed decisions around time sensitive issues like climate change, land development, or healthcare. (A related example is found in the return to prioritizing science-based decision making as a key talking point of the recent federal Liberal government’s election campaign in Canada.) Science publications can also be exceedingly expensive, and are often far more costly than those of other disciplines. In Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies, and the Future, Martin Paul Eve shifts the common open access rhetoric to focus on the humanities. Open access, Eve argues, is not only relevant to, but in fact crucial for, the humanities. Although the humanities and sciences differ in many ways, open access practices from the sciences can be translated and applied — as appropriate — for the humanities.
To illustrate his thinking, Eve walks through the key arguments for and against open access in the humanities, grouped by theme: publication, peer review, monographs, economics, and licenses. He admits that open access can be fraught in each of these areas, which makes large scale implementation challenging. Eve suggests that a possible solution to such challenges is an open access system where major libraries come together to negotiate, buy, and make available published material; he also advocates for open, post publication peer review. Eve concludes with optimism, threaded through with an imperative: “As the opportunity cost of not venturing into these territories mounts,” he writes, “it becomes incumbent on researchers, librarians, publishers and funders not only to enter into dialogue about suitable transition strategies but also to ensure that our thinking is not bounded by what merely exists” (151). Rather, Eve suggests, through a practical self-criticism inspired by Jerome McGann, we must reflect on the current modes of scholarly communication in the humanities and explore what might be possible, especially if it is as of yet new, untested, or uncharted. In doing so, Eve throws his hat in with the value of “imagin[ing] what you don’t know” (McGann 2001, 82).
Eve’s arguments are directly related to my own broader inquiry into proposed methods for the implementation of open scholarship. The most notable point of intersection is in Eve’s implicit advocacy for a humanities-centred approach to open access. Although he does suggest that many open access practices from the sciences can be applied in the humanities context, Eve is quick to point out differences between the pursuits, as well as humanities-specific considerations like the importance of long form writing (as evinced by the centrality of the monograph to the discipline). Eve provokes questions as to what a humanities-based approach to open scholarship in general might look like, beyond straightforward open access. This question resonates with the work of scholars like Johanna Drucker, who argues for humanities-centred design of digital knowledge environments (2012), and Lori Emerson, who insists on the importance of acknowledging the implications and limitations of how an interface is designed (2014). However, when it comes to conceiving of the design for open scholarship, the takeaway is less that humanities scholars differ from their colleagues in the sciences, as Eve suggests, and more that those in the humanities should be wary of corporate approaches that may not allow for sufficient flexibility, transparency, or support for humanities-specific endeavours. This draws into tension one of my own beliefs about open scholarship, fuelled by public humanities scholars like Wendy Hsu (2016) and Sheila Brennan (2016), who argue that public engagement — a central piece of the open scholarship puzzle — cannot occur in closed, academic-only spaces. If we are to prioritize the humanities element of open scholarship, and rely on the skills and expertise of digital humanities scholars in particular to build knowledge creation and dissemination platforms, as Steven E. Jones suggests (2014), how do we also meet the public where they already are? The insistence on a humanities-first approach may well be at the cost of communicating with the broader public, if such a system is purposefully separate from other knowledge dissemination and connection opportunities. Perhaps the focus on humanities-centred design and the “platform thinking” that Jones touts contradicts and contravenes open scholarship; maybe we should consider how open scholarship can be humanities-inflected regardless of the platform where it resides. Of course, this brings up serious questions regarding the ownership and manipulation of user data, the location of servers, and the possibility of academic work being monetized by corporate entities, yet again (Hall 2015). But what if, as a thought experiment, we moved away from asking whether we can create a platform for open scholarship in the humanities, and turned instead to how humanities scholarship can be done in the open? In this way, we might conceive of how to hold fast to humanities priorities while integrating our research output in venues that have not necessarily been created with solely academic knowledge mobilization in mind.
Works cited
Brennan, Sheila A. “Public, First.” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016. Ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren A. Klein. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 384–89. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/83
Drucker, Johanna. 2012. “Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/34
Emerson, Lori. 2014. Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P.
Eve, Martin. 2014. Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies, and the Future. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Hall, Gary. 2015. “Does Academia.edu Mean Open Access is Becoming Irrelevant?” Media Gifts. http://www.garyhall.info/journal/2015/10/18/does-academiaedu-mean-open-access-is-becoming-irrelevant.html
Hsu, Wendy. “Lessons on Public Humanities from the Civic Sphere.” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016. Ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren A. Klein. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 280–86. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/75
Jones, Steven E. 2014. “Publications.” In The Emergence of the Digital Humanities, 147–77. New York: Routledge.
McGann, Jerome. 2001. “Editing as a Theoretical Pursuit.” Radiant Textuality: Literary Studies After the World Wide Web, 75–97. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
