open access and the humanities a continuing education webinar offered by the school of library and...

Open Access and the Open Access and the HumanitiesHumanitiesA Continuing Education WebinarA Continuing Education Webinar

offered by the School of Library and Information Studies,offered by the School of Library and Information Studies,the iSchool at UW-Madison.the iSchool at UW-Madison.Jonathan Senchyne

Assistant Professor of Library and Information StudiesAssociate Director, Center for the History of Print and Digital

Culturetwitter: @jsench#oahumanities

04/21/23 UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN 2

Why?Why?

Discipline-specific conversations matter.

They matter especially in spaces of cross-disciplinary contact (such as the

library or the university as a whole) because confusion, misunderstanding,

and mistrust can occur.


What is OA?What is OA?

“The free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly

research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need.” –

OpenAccessWeek.org


What are the humanities?What are the humanities?“The humanities can be described as how people process and document the human

experience.” – Stanford Humanities Center.

Also, a habitus of disciplinary practices for generating, debating, and sharing

knowledge in fields such as English, History, Philosophy, and so on.


Related, but not central to Related, but not central to today’s conversation…today’s conversation…

Digital HumanitiesPublic Humanities


Case Study: Case Study: AHA and Dissertation AHA and Dissertation

EmbargoEmbargoSummer 2013 statement encouraging graduate schools and university libraries to permit students the

flexibility to embargo digital access to dissertations for as long as 6 years.


AHA and Dissertation AHA and Dissertation EmbargoEmbargoLinks:

AHA Statement: http://blog.historians.org/2013/07/american-historical-association-statement-on-policies-regarding-the-embargoing-of-completed-history-phd-dissertations/

Q&A with then AHA President, Jacqueline Joneshttp://blog.historians.org/2013/07/qa-on-the-ahas-statement-on-embargoing-of-history-dissertations/

Reflection from Bill Cronon, UW-Madison History Professor/former AHA president

http://blog.historians.org/2013/07/why-put-at-risk-the-publishing-options-of-our-most-vulnerable-colleagues/


AHA and Dissertation EmbargoAHA and Dissertation EmbargoSome reactions:Some reactions:

Barbara Fister, academic librarian:

Books are what matters to historians and that will never change. Publishers are an immutable force of nature, as are tenure and

promotion committees. Librarians and program heads, however, can be told what to do. If they don’t change their ways “young historians” will lose the “unfettered ability . . . to revise their dissertations and obtain a publishing contract from a press"

because those pesky online dissertations are standing between a scholar and a fetter-free book contract. Turn the clock back. Put those printed dissertations on the shelf where they can be safely

obscure. Protect the children.

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/aha-asks-what-about-children


AHA and Dissertation EmbargoAHA and Dissertation EmbargoSome reactions:Some reactions:Mark Sample, @samplereality

“Disembargo”http://disembargo.aws.af.cm/

http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/disembargo-an-open-access-dissertation-one-letter-at-a-time/52997

“Every ten minutes, Disembargo releases a single character—a letter, number, or space—from my final dissertation manuscript…. At the current rate of access (six characters per hour, or roughly twenty-five words a day), the entire dissertation will be available

in the fall of 2019.”


AHA and Dissertation AHA and Dissertation Embargo:Embargo:

What does each “side” value?What does each “side” value?caveat emptor: this is reductivecaveat emptor: this is reductiveAHA/Discipline-specific thinking:

Values protecting pathways in the profession from even more external pressures. Values the transfer of

traditional habits, workflows, and systems of evaluation from one generation to the next. Values

much longer periods of time, consideration, and iteration before a final expression of research is

released into the world through the imprimatur of an authoritative channel and time/resource intensive

process. Values the writing and evaluation of scholarship/content over and above its distribution, storage, preservation, and access as an “item” in a larger collection or system. Responsive to market pressures within the academic job market and the

tenuring process. 04/21/23 UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN 11


What does each “side” value?What does each “side” value?caveat emptor: this is reductivecaveat emptor: this is reductiveLibrary-specific thinking:

Values the distribution, storage, preservation, and access to large collections or systems of information over and above the processes through which any one item came into existence. Encounters “content” as a finished product, not necessarily. Looks at costs of

entire ecosystem more frequently than costs/investments of individual actors within it. Is

less concerned with the maintenance and transmission of disciplinary forms of evaluation and

tradition. Responsive to market forces in state/private library budgeting, escalating costs of private

information resources contracts, and potential impacts on everyday users/patrons.



What does each “side” value?What does each “side” value?caveat emptor: this is reductivecaveat emptor: this is reductiveAlso At Issue:

Are researchers more than “content providers?”

Are librarians more than “service workers?”

Yes and yes. But each side can be defensive and retreat to comfortable commonplaces in

moments of conflict and crisis. 04/21/23 UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN 13


What does each “side” value?What does each “side” value?For More (and less polarized approach), see

AHA 2015 Panel Storify: https://storify.com/michaelhattem/aha-panel-

123-choosing-to-embargo-what-to-do-withScholarly Kitchen conversations on embargo:http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/tag/embar

goes/


Why is this so difficult for the Why is this so difficult for the humanities?humanities?

Why don’t you just get yourself a version of arXiv.org?

Why don’t your grants just start requiring OA publication?

And so on.




Here’s where digital humanities comes back in. Many people are working on just this.

New digital publication forms with different structures of peer review like DHDebates.

http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debatesOr ADA: Journal of Gender, New Media and

Technology.http://adanewmedia.org/beta-reader-and-review-

policy/




Here’s where digital humanities comes back in.

Many people are working on just this.

New(er) field / disciplinary emergence attempting to recalibrate disciplinary

communication and evaluation practices and traditions from within.




Misunderstands the scale of funding for humanities research.




National Endowment for the Humanities 2014 Budget: $146

million.National Science Foundation 2015

Budget: 7.26 billion.(Not to mention NIH and DoD)




Common form of grant/fellowship:Short-term research fellowship at a major archive of primary source

documents:

$1850 to cover travel and lodging for a month of research in residence.(American Antiquarian Society Short-term Fellowships: http://www.americanantiquarian.org/acafellowship.htm

Prestigious long-term fellowships replace a portion of your salary for a semester or academic year.

They do not have built-in provisions to subvent publication in traditional or open access publication.

They also tend not to pay overhead costs to your institution.



There are OA options however. Some traditional journals have gone OA or

have provisions in contracts to permit submissions to institutional

repositories.

These are good steps, and there needs to be great education of and

commitment by faculty to understand issues of copyright and contract and

to know about their institutional repository.



There are OA options however.

And some for-profit publishers are making pre-paid OA avenues open, but again, cost is

an issue.

Palgrave OA costs: Monographs: $17,500

NEH Semester-long postdoc fellowship(salary replacement in lieu of teaching):

$25,000



Could Universities subvent these costs to support faculty OA publications?

Yes. And many do: http://www.sparc.arl.org/resource/oa-fund-five-year-review

But in a budget climate of dwindling higher education resources, especially for the humanities, these programs

can get deprioritized.

It happened at UW-Madison:https://www.library.wisc.edu/about/scholarly-

communication/open-access-publishing-support-fund/


Other Disciplinary Other Disciplinary Differences Worth NotingDifferences Worth Noting

Part of the Open Access movement’s politics is fighting the high costs of access to digital databases licensed at exorbitant rates by for-profit publishers.

For example, University of California Librarians boycotting Nature. http://phys.org/news195486711.html

But, in my estimation, most U.S.-based humanities scholarship (monographs as well as journals) is published by not-for-profit university presses who don’t reap

the profits that the Palgraves and Wileys do, but who also don’t charge the same prices.

Institutional Subscription (print and online) to J19: Journal of 19th-Century Americanists (Penn UP): $85

Institutional License for UC Berkeley to Nature group publications: more than $1 million.



Given these differences (for profit, not for profit / grant and subvention differences) many argue that we need to find ways to sustain rather than disrupt the traditional

not for profit university press system. Given all of the high quality low cost

intellectual labor sustained through these processes, we need to support them

(financially) in ways that make sense with digital affordances, rather than make

everything free/open.04/21/23 UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN 26


See recent very important discussion with William and Mary Quarterly editor Karin Wulf in The Scholarly

Kitchen:http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2015/03/25/guest-post-karin-

wulf-on-open-access-and-historical-scholarship/

“There needs to be more and regular attention to the importance of heterogeneous models of access, dissemination, and

production. Scholarship is developed in very different ways, within very distinctive research and publication ecosystems. No

one would suggest that biologists and film scholars organize, finance, and undertake their research along similar lines. And we know very well that the resulting scholarship is not consumed in the same way. Why, then, should we assume that the results of

that research–published scholarship—can be produced and disseminated in the same way? Especially when analyses now suggest that this is an unlikely—perhaps even undesirable—

outcome.”


OA and the Humanities:OA and the Humanities:UpsidesUpsides

At UW-Madison, Tim Elfenbein recently worked to make the Cultural Anthropology

an open access journal with a diverse range of content.

http://www.culanth.org/http://www.culanth.org/articles/

open_access



When done right, and in a way that is respectful of responsive to, the disciplines that create and knowledge and “content,”

OA can live up to its promises in the humanities and help broader publics (here

come the public humanities back in) access research and appreciate the value

of humanities thinking, research, and teaching.



For example, Elfenbein recently documented how OA and smart article

titling lead to dramatic spikes in readership when difficult to understand

issues emerged in global politics, but Cultural Anthropology’s authors had

answers.https://twitter.com/timelfen/status/

590164774693941248



"'Xenophobia' in South Africa: Order, Chaos, and the Moral Economy of

Witchcraft.” was viewed 5000+ times in the past week as readers looked for ways

of putting current events in context.


OA and the Humanities:OA and the Humanities:Takeaways.Takeaways.


Not all scholarly communication is the same. Socially, politically, economically.

Disciplines and habits are both enabling and disabling.

Faculty/researchers and librarians would do well to understand what is enabling and disabling about the habits and patterns of each party’s approach to these questions, rather than either thinking they have a monopoly on the best solution.

It’s not just fuddy duddy professors on one side and nonthinking technocrats on the other!

Faculty/researchers and librarians alike need to respect what makes each of their disciplinary habits work, especially when they don’t share overlapping values on an issue, and they need to work together to figure out which set of priorities is valued more highly when there are conflicts.

Questions?

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