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

Freeman, Margaret H. freemamh at lavc.edu
Thu Aug 23 19:37:25 BST 2012 

There is one open access site that enables authors to post working papers as
well as those accepted for publication: the Social Sciences Research
Network, which also includes categories for the humanities. I have found the
Cognitive Science Network category useful in getting my papers disseminated.
It is not entirely open access: publications that are copyrighted only show
the abstracts. However, I find people who can¹t access the journal or book
tend to email for an electronic copy.

Cheers,


Margaret H. Freeman
Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts
P. O. Box 132
23 Avery Brook Road
Heath, MA 01346-0132
413.337.4854
Website: myrifield.org
Blog: myrifield.wordpress.com

You can access a selection of my papers on the Social Science Research
Network (SSRN) at: http://ssrn.com/author=1248859. A full list may be found
at http://margarethfreeman.wordpress.com/publications/.

Without stories, memory falters; and without memory, imagination fails.
(Peter Schjeldahl)


On 8/23/12 10:47 AM, "Jean-Claude Guédon" <jean.claude.guedon at umontreal.ca>
wrote:

> 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&vi
>> ew=article&articleId=1214091
>> <http://www.researchresearch.com/index.php?option=com_news&amp;template=rr_2c
>> ol&amp;view=article&amp;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 <http://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 UK¹s 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 don¹t 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. Let¹s 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
>> <http://www.openedition.org/10221?lang=en>  (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
>>  Tél : 04 13 55 03 40 Tél. direct : 04 13 55 03 39 Fax : 04 13 55 03 41
>>  Skype : marin.dacos - Gmail video chat : marin.dacos at gmail.com
>>  Twitter : http://twitter.com/#!/marindacos
>> <http://twitter.com/#%21/marindacos>
>>  
>>  
>>  
>> 
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