Dear colleagues,<div><br></div><div>I would like to share with you this very interesting article from Peter Webster : <i>Humanities left behind in the dash for open access</i></div><div><a href="http://www.researchresearch.com/index.php?option=com_news&template=rr_2col&view=article&articleId=1214091">http://www.researchresearch.com/index.php?option=com_news&template=rr_2col&view=article&articleId=1214091</a><br>
</div><div><br></div><div>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 <<a href="http://tcp.hypotheses.org/411">http://tcp.hypotheses.org/411</a>>, including social sciences. Peter Webster explains that humanities (and social sciences) are specific because :</div>
<div>1- the book is the most prestigious type of publication, when articles are more important in a lot of other disciplines,</div><div>2- a five or ten year old book/article is not obsolete</div><div>3- their budgets are low and they are poor</div>
<div>4- humanists do not involve in the green road </div><div>5- humanities do not need much money.</div><div><br>I am ok with 1, 2 and 3, but I would add some remarks to 4 and 5, and add two more points :</div><div>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 <<a href="http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/">http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/</a>>, 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?</div>
<div>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 <<a href="http://www.acls.org/programs/Default.aspx?id=644">http://www.acls.org/programs/Default.aspx?id=644</a>>. We are building them in US (Bamboo) and Europe (DARIAH, JISC, ADONIS, BSN...).</div>
<div>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).<br>
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 <a href="http://unglue.it">unglue.it</a> and freemium model, like OpenEdition freemium. These two solution, that's not a coincidence, are coming from HSS.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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 <<a href="http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Main_Page">http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Main_Page</a>> in share more informations in this field. If you have any informations to share, do not hesitate to send it.<br>
<br>Best regards,</div><div>Marin Dacos</div><div>CNRS</div><div>Director - Centre for Open Electronic Publishing<br></div><div><br clear="all"><div><br></div><div><h1 class="headerBorder" style="margin:0px;outline:none;padding:0px 0px 3px;color:rgb(0,10,23);font-weight:normal;font-size:24px;font-family:'Trebuchet MS',Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;border-bottom-width:1px;border-bottom-style:dotted;border-bottom-color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">
Humanities left behind in the dash for open access</h1><div class="article reportDetail" style="margin:0px;outline:none;padding:15px 0px 0px;min-height:900px;color:rgb(68,68,68);font-family:'Trebuchet MS',Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:12px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">
<div class="articleStandfirst" style="outline:none;padding:0px 0px 3px;font-size:19px;color:rgb(0,10,23)">Peter Webster</div><div class="articleDetails" style="margin:0px;outline:none;padding:10px 0px;font-size:13px"></div>
<div class="articleDetails" style="margin:0px;outline:none;padding:0px;font-size:13px"><strong style="margin:0px;outline:none;padding:0px">Research Fortnight</strong></div><div class="articleDetails" style="margin:0px;outline:none;padding:0px;font-size:13px">
<em style="margin:0px;outline:none;padding:0px">25-07-2012</em></div><br style="margin:0px;outline:none;padding:0px"><p style="margin:0px;outline:none;padding:0px 0px 10px;line-height:19px;font-size:13px">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.</p>
<p style="margin:0px;outline:none;padding:0px 0px 10px;line-height:19px;font-size:13px">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.</p>
<p style="margin:0px;outline:none;padding:0px 0px 10px;line-height:19px;font-size:13px">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.</p>
<p style="margin:0px;outline:none;padding:0px 0px 10px;line-height:19px;font-size:13px">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.</p>
<p style="margin:0px;outline:none;padding:0px 0px 10px;line-height:19px;font-size:13px">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.</p>
<p style="margin:0px;outline:none;padding:0px 0px 10px;line-height:19px;font-size:13px">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.</p>
<p style="margin:0px;outline:none;padding:0px 0px 10px;line-height:19px;font-size:13px">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.</p>
<p style="margin:0px;outline:none;padding:0px 0px 10px;line-height:19px;font-size:13px">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.</p>
<p style="margin:0px;outline:none;padding:0px 0px 10px;line-height:19px;font-size:13px">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.</p>
<p style="margin:0px;outline:none;padding:0px 0px 10px;line-height:19px;font-size:13px">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.</p>
<p style="margin:0px;outline:none;padding:0px 0px 10px;line-height:19px;font-size:13px">More to say? Email comment@Research Research.com</p><p style="margin:0px;outline:none;padding:0px 0px 10px;line-height:19px;font-size:13px">
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.</p><p style="margin:0px;outline:none;padding:0px 0px 10px;line-height:19px;font-size:13px">
<br></p></div></div>-- <br>Marin Dacos - <a href="http://www.openedition.org" target="_blank">http://www.openedition.org</a> <br>Director - Centre for Open Electronic Publishing<br><br>** OpenEdition is now a <a href="http://www.openedition.org/10221?lang=en" target="_blank">Facility of Excellence</a><b> </b>(Equipex) **<div>
** New email : <a href="mailto:marin.dacos@openedition.org" target="_blank">marin.dacos@openedition.org</a> **<br><div><br></div><div>CNRS - EHESS - Aix-Marseille Université (AMU) - Université d'Avignon<br>3, place Victor Hugo, Case n°86, 13331 Marseille Cedex 3 - France<br>
Tél : 04 13 55 03 40 Tél. direct : 04 13 55 03 39 Fax : 04 13 55 03 41<br>Skype : marin.dacos - Gmail video chat : <a href="mailto:marin.dacos@gmail.com" target="_blank">marin.dacos@gmail.com</a><br>Twitter : <a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/marindacos" target="_blank">http://twitter.com/#!/marindacos</a> <br>
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