The [U.S.] NEH [National Endowment for the Humanities] has issued new guidelines [for Scholarly Edition Grants] — just as scholars were finishing grant applications — granting preference to those projects that make all of their documents freely available online.
While the scholars who work on these projects support digitization (and generally do put their work online), they say that the humanities endowment’s plan could make it impossible for university presses to afford to publish their work [in a non-OA form].
“We could be squandering years of key research, and huge investments we’ve all made in this work. This is just an incredible shame,” said Leslie Rowland, an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland at College Park, who directs a project to produce a nine-volume collection of documents, Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867.
The Association for Documentary Editing [ADE], a group that represents scholars like Rowland, sent a letter to the NEH asking for a meeting to discuss these issues. University press directors are also weighing in against the changes.
NEH officials said that they could not comment in any detail on the complaints being raised. An NEH spokesman said that all he could say was that officials were studying the “thoughtful letter” they had received from the Association for Documentary Editing and planned to meet “soon” with critics of the program’s direction, and that “our support for scholarly editions continues unabated.” ...
[Preferring projects that provide OA] sounds good in theory, wrote [Roger A. Bruns, president of the Association for Documentary Editing], but raises all kinds of issues — especially since the announcement came as a surprise.
“No electronic publication of any value and guaranteed permanence can be designed with two months lead time. Moreover, most editors already in the midst of ongoing book editions are not in a position to determine whether or not their work will appear in electronic form. Few, if any, project directors or host institutions control the rights to these editions,” he wrote.
So the NEH is asking project directors to promise open access to material to which they don’t own the rights, he said. Further, the publishers that frequently do own the rights have “made substantial financial investments in these editions with little or no profit to show for it,” he wrote....
Here's the exact language from the new NEH guidelines (August 20, 2006):
In keeping with the goals of the NEH Digital Humanities Initiative, the Scholarly Editions Program requires that applicants employ digital technology in the preparation, management, and online publication of all critical and documentary editions. Projects that include TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) conformant transcription and offer free online access are encouraged and will be given preference.
I talked to the NEH in 2003 about adopting this policy and I'm delighted to see it finally do so. (Actually, I wanted to see it mandate OA to NEH-funded research and scholarly editions, but a funding preference for OA projects is a big step in the right direction.) There may be problems with the timing of the announcement, just as applicants are finishing their applications, and undoubtedly some projects will have permission problems that stand in the way of OA. But taxpayers deserve OA to publicly-funded scholarship, regardless of its field or discipline.
I don't have the full context for Leslie Rowland's statement that the new OA preference is "an incredible shame" because she and her team "could be squandering years of key research, and huge investments". It's possible that she is only deploring the timing of the NEH announcement, the difficulty of altering her project in the short time allowed, and her reduced prospects for funding. But if she means that OA rather than TA for her nine-volume documentary history of emancipation would "squander" the labor that has gone into it, then she is forgetting that OA will hugely increase the audience and impact of her work. And on the other side, scholars and citizens who would like to read her work have a symmetrical complaint. How often have taxpayers squandered public funds on research that is locked away behind price barriers and accessible only to scholars affiliated with wealthy institutions?
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/18/2006 01:00:00 PM.
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.
