[BOAI] Humanities left behind in the dash for open access ?

[Marin Dacos]

Dear colleagues,

I would like to share with you this very interesting article from Peter
Webster : *Humanities left behind in the dash for open access*
http://www.researchresearch.com/index.php?option=com_news&template=rr_2col&view=article&articleId=1214091

This short text is worth reading, to understand the specific situation in
Humanities, which must be extended to a wide definition, as defined in the
Digital Humanities Manifesto <http://tcp.hypotheses.org/411>, including
social sciences. Peter Webster explains that humanities (and social
sciences) are specific because :
1- the book is the most prestigious type of publication, when articles are
more important in a lot of other disciplines,
2- a five or ten year old book/article is not obsolete
3- their budgets are low and they are poor
4- humanists do not involve in the green road
5- humanities do not need much money.

I am ok with 1, 2 and 3, but I would add some remarks to 4 and 5, and add
two more points :
4- the green road is not that weak in HSS as Peter Webster see it in Uk ;
in France, we have at least 39 256 full text articles in HAL in HSS <
http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/>, when the total number of articles in
HAL in France is 200 000 (all disciplines) : who said that HSS are
conservative and slow to go digital?
5- it is not true that humanities and social sciences does need only a pen
and a good library. Indeed, a lot of people, even in HSS, think that there
is not need for money in HSS. In fact, we need, more and more, massive
investments in Cyber-infrastructure, as the 2006 ACLS report called them <
http://www.acls.org/programs/Default.aspx?id=644>. We are building them in
US (Bamboo) and Europe (DARIAH, JISC, ADONIS, BSN...).
6- English language is not as dominant in HSS than in other disciplines
such as physics, and that leads to a more fragmented publishing landscape
than in other fields. That could be considered as a weakness, but this is
an opportunity, since Elsevier, Springer and other major publishers do not
rule our fields (yet).
7- In the beginning, the green road was authors-sided, and the gold road
publishers-sided. I am afraid that now the gold road is considered only as
author-pays model, when it is not the only, nor the best, model that we
should try for this road. There are at least two other models: unglueing
models, like unglue.it and freemium model, like OpenEdition freemium. These
two solution, that's not a coincidence, are coming from HSS.

I think that there are a lot of opportunities to go forward, and innovate,
in open access in Arts, Humanities and Social sciences. I would be happy to
contribute to Peter Suber's Open Access Directory <
http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Main_Page> in share more informations in
this field. If you have any informations to share, do not hesitate to send
it.

Best regards,
Marin Dacos
CNRS
Director - Centre for Open Electronic Publishing


Humanities left behind in the dash for open access
Peter Webster
*Research Fortnight*
*25-07-2012*

About this time last year, open access had apparently come of age.
According to a study published in the journal PloS One, freely accessible
publishing had passed from an early experimental phase into a period of
consolidation, with the number of papers showing steady growth. The model
had been shown to work.

As an academic based in a specialist research institution in the arts and
humanities, the suggestion that open access had come of age did not ring
true to me then, and still does not a year later. Hard figures are
difficult to come by, but few of the top journals in the humanities are
open access, and those hybrid journals that offer an author-pays option
have seen limited take-up. There is no Public Library of History to match
the phenomenally successful Public Library of Science.

As for the green route to open access, the institutional repositories, one
of which I manage, have seen similarly slow progress. Again, statistics are
difficult to find, but my own recent survey of a sample of repositories at
the UK’s pre-1992 universities found that, on average, each contains fewer
than 10 papers for English language and literature, and not many more for
history.

It is tempting to look for cultural roots to this problem, and for evidence
of ingrained resistance to change, but I don’t think that gets us very far.
Better to look at the distinctive ways in which humanities research is
communicated.

One difference with the sciences is in the speed with which research passes
out of date. It is rare to find competing research groups racing to find
the historical equivalent of a cure for cancer or the Higgs boson.
Humanities research often retains its currency for a good deal longer than
work in the natural sciences, and so there is not the same need for speed;
a lag of a year or two between submission and publication is not felt so
keenly. The most downloaded of my own papers in 2012 is also the oldest,
published in 2006 and largely written in 2004.

Another issue is the centrality of the monograph. The single-author,
research-heavy tome is still the gold standard of humanities publishing,
without which it is difficult to secure the crucial first academic job
after graduate study. And yet the decade-old debate about open access has
concentrated almost entirely on journals and repositories. So far, there is
little sign of a business model for book publishing. The OAPEN-UK project
into open-access ebooks, funded by Jisc and the Arts and Humanities
Research Council, promises much in this direction, but it is not set to
conclude until 2015.

There are also basic issues of funding. In the sciences, funding agencies
are expected to cover the cost of author publication charges, but only a
small proportion of humanities research is directly funded by grants.
Between 2007 and 2010, the AHRC directly funded an average of just over
2,000 research outputs a year across all its disciplines. But over the same
period nearly the same number of items were submitted to the 2008 Research
Assessment Exercise for each year it covered for English and modern
languages alone.

To get a sense of the total scale of humanities publishing, we also need to
count all the outputs for the other arts and humanities disciplines, plus
all the work not entered for the RAE, and the publications of the army of
contract researchers and others not eligible for assessment. The total
figure is almost impossible to determine, but there is clearly a gulf
between the amount of research being published and the amount that is
directly funded. If this is to be bridged, universities will need to find
funds to cover the upfront charges for gold open access for their staff,
some of which is likely to come from the research councils, after a recent
announcement from Research Councils UK.

Even if the universities were to fund universal gold open access, there
would still be major harm to another part of humanities scholarship:
independent scholars. By and large, humanities scholars do not need large
capital equipment and facilities, beyond a good library. As such, scholars
outside universities—in museums, libraries, archives, across the
professions and not least among the retired—regularly publish world-leading
research. Universal gold open access funded by the author would wipe much
of this work out.

All the disciplines stand to gain from a successful move to open access.
However, much of the discussion about open access has been driven by the
needs of the sciences. Let’s not allow the humanities to be collateral
damage along the way.

More to say? Email comment at Research Research.com

Peter Webster is manager of SAS-Space, the institutional repository for the
School of Advanced Study, University of London. He writes here in a
personal capacity.


-- 
Marin Dacos - http://www.openedition.org
Director - Centre for Open Electronic Publishing

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