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Digital Humanities in 2008, II: Scholarly Communication & Open Access
Posted on February 24, 2009 by Lisa Spiro
Open access, just like dark chocolate and blueberries, is good and good for you, enabling information to be mined and reused, fostering the exchange of ideas, and ensuring public access to research that taxpayers often helped to fund. Moreover, as Dan Cohen contends, scholars benefit from open access to their work, since their own visibility increases: “In a world where we have instantaneous access to billions of documents online, why would you want the precious article or book you spent so much time on to exist only on paper, or behind a pay wall? This is a sure path to invisibility in the digital age.” Thus some scholars are embracing social scholarship, which promotes openness, collaboration, and sharing research. This year saw some positive developments in open access and scholarly communications, such as the implementation of the NIH mandate, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts & Science’s decision to go open access (followed by Harvard Law), and the launch of the Open Humanities Press. But there were also some worrisome developments (the Conyers Bill’s attempt to rescind the NIH mandate, EndNote’s lawsuit against Zotero) and some confusing ones (the Google Books settlement). In the second part of my summary on the year in digital humanities, I’ll look broadly at the scholarly communication landscape, discussing open access to educational materials, new publication models, the Google Books settlement, and cultural obstacles to digital publication.
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