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

[Jean-Claude Guédon]

I just want to support what Marin wrote below. I agree with all he says.
I have had nagging feelings that parallel his remarks.

One thing that worries me is that the tactical emphasis on "picking up
the low hanging fruits first" does result in leaving the humanities, and
even the social sciences behind. And I could add the fine arts
publication to which Marin alludes, and which are far too ignored.

Worse, picking up the low-hanging fruit might create a kind of cultural
bias (or bad habit) in the OA community that tends to make it ever more
insensitive to needs other than those of the communities corresponding
to the low-hanging fruits. An example of this is the conflation of Gold
with author-pay which is particularly wrong in the case of non-profit OA
HSS journals.

The goal, of course, is to design a narrow, focused, simple message to
the community of researchers, but, as presently oriented, it can result
in a message that does not easily reach and touch HSS researchers. The
end result is that many of these researchers do not feel concerned by
the OA movement, and we lose precious allies.

A particular example of this bias is the contant reiteration by some of
our colleagues that there are only 25K or so peer-reviewed titles in the
world. Various authors I have mentioned in the past (e.g. Derek de Solla
Price and Jack Meadows) have produced other, much larger, numbers. John
Willinsky mentioned C. Tenopir to me as one other person that does not
agree with the 25K figure. Yet, these reiterated concerns are not taken
into consideration for reasons that I do not understand. Neither are
they refuted. 

In short, when we speak of low-hanging fruit, we are speaking about a
specific variety of low-hanging fruit. This form of reasoning puts a
peculiar spin on the OA movement that may run contrary to its quest for
tactical efficiency.

Jean-Claude Guédon




Le jeudi 23 août 2012 à 14:48 +0200, Marin Dacos a écrit :

> 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
> 
> ** OpenEdition is now a Facility of Excellence (Equipex) **
> 
> ** New email : marin.dacos at openedition.org **
> 
> 
> 
> CNRS - EHESS - Aix-Marseille Université (AMU) - Université d'Avignon
> 3, place Victor Hugo, Case n°86, 13331 Marseille Cedex 3 - France
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> 
> 
> 
> 
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