by Francesca Giannetti and Joseph Goeller
Last October, we assembled a panel of six outstanding speakers representing a range of perspectives to talk about open access and humanities scholarship. Open access in the sciences, a.k.a. Open Science, has become well established, especially so after the 2013 and 2022 Memoranda from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) reinforcing the idea that everyone, not just scholars at wealthy institutions, should have access to important and useful research, especially so when that research is paid for with public money. What is less well appreciated is that the 2022 memo—also known as the Nelson memo—provides guidance to ALL federal agencies, including the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). This latest guidance clarifies that scholarly publications as well as data are included in the public access policy. But there is a lack of comparable discourse or established practices regarding open access in the humanities. What would that discourse or those practices look like, particularly when funding and infrastructure are in shorter supply? What are the benefits of making humanities scholarship open? How to resist an academic culture that prioritizes traditional outputs over values-driven, community-engaged processes?
We went for the bold choice of “open humanities” in our event title, instead of the more discipline neutral open scholarship, which led to inevitable translational issues when communicating about the importance of our subject. Fortunately, we recorded the panel so that people interested in the topic can find out about it post hoc. See below for the recording followed by timestamped summaries of the talks.
We owe a debt of gratitude to Dee Magnoni, then Director of New Brunswick Libraries and now Executive Director of the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research, and Kath Burton, Humanities Development at Taylor & Francis, for providing us with the seed of an event idea as well as funding to invite this incredible panel of experts. In addition, we thank the SAS Division of Humanities and the Office of the Vice Provost for Research for their support.
Co-creating value in open humanities scholarship: Where we are and where we’re heading
The pitch
We have been hearing for years that scholarly communication is in crisis, although the shape of that particular crisis differs across the disciplines. In the humanities, a siloed scholarly publishing landscape combined with editorial gatekeeping, ponderous formal publication timelines, and lately, with e-preferred library acquisition policies, makes the circulation of humanities scholarship, and consequently its impact in the world, more difficult.
Open Humanities refers to a set of practices that has yet to coalesce into a dedicated discourse. Emerging partly from the ill fit of open science tenets that rely on quantitative measures of quality and research reproducibility—statements and practices of limited value in the humanities—open humanities points towards a solution that brings greater transparency and openness to scholarly debate. Whether we call it open scholarship, open knowledge, or open humanities, the practices in question include preprints (a manuscript of an article, book, or chapter made available in a reputable online repository), open peer review, and generous copyright licenses, among other things. To foster a thriving culture of debate in the humanities, in which diverse opinions are heard, cross-sectoral collaboration and a foregrounding of open values is required to support meaningful transformation for the widest range of participants.
As we move towards a more open and transparent research, practice and publishing landscape, how might the unique facets of the humanities shape open scholarship, bridge disciplinary divides, and lead to greater impact? This panel explores a range of possibilities.
The recording
| Timestamp | Speaker | Summary |
|---|---|---|
| 03:40 | Seth Russell, Open Research Business Manager for the Americas, Taylor & Francis | While humanities and social science journals constitute a majority of T&F’s portfolio, very few of them are published open access. Russell concludes this is the result of a myriad of issues, including a lack of funding, which he hopes to help address by negotiating Read-and-Publish agreements with libraries. |
| 11:34 | Nicky Agate, Associate Dean for Academic Engagement at Carnegie Mellon Libraries and co-PI of the HuMetricsHSS Initiative | The lack of openness in humanities is a product of the culture of higher education, which is competitive and toxic. This can discourage scholars from participating in undervalued but highly important work like public engagement, mentoring, publishing open access research, and creating open educational resources (OER). The HuMetricHSS Initiative helps institutions explore what it would look like to “measure what [they] value, rather than valuing what [they] measure.” |
| 19:05 | Laura McGrath, Assistant Professor of English at Temple University and editorial board member of the Post45 Data Collective | The Post45 Data Collective is a case study in showing how open humanities data can invigorate the humanities research ecosystem. In a period of literary study affected by copyright law, making corpus studies difficult if not impossible, a group of scholars studying the “data footprint of books” explore the interconnectedness of their questions and the advantages of sharing bespoke bibliographic datasets. The Post45 Data Collective prioritizes peer review of datasets, replication, and teaching. |
| 31:19 | Zoe Wake Hyde, Community Development Manager, Humanities Commons | Humanities Commons is a free platform to share and discover works, network with other scholars, and increase the visibility of humanities research. Open infrastructure for humanities research is important to avoid exploitation (e.g. personal data mining), increase opportunities to understand from the researcher community what needs fixing, and allow for more customization and local contextualization. Transparency is central to how Humanities Commons understands the work of infrastructure: open source software adapted for its user community and then re-shared to support a thriving commons. |
| 42:36 | Kath Burton, Editorial Development Director, Routledge Journals (Humanities, Media and the Arts) | As co-convener of Publishing and the Publicly Engaged Humanities working group, Burton seeks a wider public audience and greater impact for humanities scholarship. Currently surveying publication practices with partners at Center for the Humanities at CUNY. Publicly-engaged scholarship requires accountability, candor and transparency, learning from failure, open processes, and open source. Points to SNCC Legacy Project (Center for Documentary Studies & Duke University Libraries) as example of values- and community-based digital project with multiple pathways for different user groups. |
| 54:45 | Jen Grayburn, Assistant Director of Research Data and Open Scholarship, Princeton University Library | Grayburn acknowledges gaps in metaknowledge about online publishing. Observes comparatively low uptake of the library’s open access services in humanities disciplines, including funding applications. By contrast, seeing large demand for faculty in editorial roles wanting to convert a subscription journal to open. Possible solutions: earlier and broader education about open, personalized support, reassessment of reward systems, new services for OA publication transitions. |
| 1:08:58 | Moderated Q&A | Questions from the audience about infrastructure, economics, types of open access, policy, metrics, and rights. |
Highlights from the discussion
Rutgers was one of the first to implement an open access policy that included graduate students (University Policy 50.3.17).
Scholars in the humanities usually don’t have the funding for Article Processing Charges (APCs) to make their work open access. This is sometimes called “gold” open access. However, this isn’t the only way to make one’s work publicly accessible. There is “green” open access, also known as self-archiving or the repository route, and the Rutgers University Libraries implement this form of open access in SOAR. Librarians will work with scholars to ensure publisher policies are met in terms of the version to archive (whether the publisher’s or the author’s) and the embargo period to observe, if relevant. SOAR can also accept data deposits of under 5 GB associated with accepted manuscripts (see SOAR user manual). The advantage to scholars, as Nicky Agate pointed out, is that open access versions boost the sales of the publishers’ versions and increase citation counts.
While we are on the topic of data, for anyone seeking advice for a data deposit that does not conform to SOAR’s requirements, please speak with the New Brunswick Libraries Data Services Team at nbl_datateam [AT] libraries.rutgers.edu.
Recommended readings
Eve, Martin Paul, and Jonathan Gray, eds. 2020. Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11885.001.0001.