Unlike the humanities, in most of the sciences today, the debates about open access (OA) are focused on ethical, professional and financial issues, not intellectual ones. In other words, few disagree that "the world-wide distribution of peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other interested minds" (to use Professor James Till's phrasing) is a positive intellectual move....
In the humanities, little of this debate has been evident. Perhaps it is because the publication of humanities research findings is less time sensitive, so rapid OA archiving has not seemed necessary. The silence about OA publishing is likely because of the continuing emphasis on monograph rather than article publication: books are still the currency in the tenure and promotion market. But the much discussed "crisis in scholarly publishing" has steadily been taking its toll, prompting the Modern Language Association of America to urge changes in the tenure process to provide more recognition for research disseminated in other than book form. If libraries cannot afford to but new scholarly books and university presses cannot afford to publish books few will buy and so cut back on their lists, junior scholars cannot get their books into print and therefore find it difficult to get tenure.
There are two obvious answers to this professional problem and both should be considered seriously. The first is the publication of books electronically: in July, an announcement was made that Rice University Press (which ceased publication in 1996) was being revived but would publish only online books --- peer reviewed, like all high quality scholarly publications....The second answer is that university tenure and promotion committees in the humanities should move away from the printed book as the measure of success and validate journal articles (in print or online) or electronic books as well, when the same processes of peer review are in place....
[T]his kind of step...would be a positive response to the crisis faced by young scholars whose careers are bying hijacked by the economic problems of the scholarly publishing industry....
In the course of our research, we often amass enormous files of visual and print materials that we could store --- and share --- through open access repositories. In my experience, few scholars feel particularly possessive about the material, even if they have often gathered it arduously: they share it readily with colleagues and students. The next step would be to share it with even more interested people through this kind of public archive....
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
