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Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Final version of ACLS report

Our Cultural Commonwealth, the final version of the report by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities & Social Sciences, released December 13, 2006.  (Thanks to if:book.)  From the Executive Summary:

In chapter 3, the Commission also recommends the following measures...:

1. Invest in cyberinfrastructure for the humanities and social sciences, as a matter of strategic priority....

2. Develop public and institutional policies that foster openness and access.

Addressed to: University presidents, boards of trustees, provosts, and counsels; university presses; funding agencies; libraries; scholarly societies; Congress

Implementation: The leadership of the humanities and social sciences should develop, adopt, and advocate for public and institutional polices that foster openness and access....

5. Encourage digital scholarship....

From the body of the report:

By comparison with print, born-digital scholarship will be expensive for publishers to create and, over time, even more expensive for libraries to maintain. Even considering these costs, however, owning and maintaining digital collections locally or consortially, rather than renting access to them from commercial publishers, is likely to be a cost-cutting strategy in the long run. If universities do not own the content they produce —if they do not collect it, hold it, and preserve it— then commercial interests will certainly step in to do the job, and they will do it on the basis of market demand rather than as a public good. If universities do collect, preserve, and provide open access to the content they produce, and if everyone in the system of scholarly communication understands that the goods being produced and shared are in fact public goods and not private property, the remaining challenge will be to determine how much, and what, to produce....

[U]niversity presses could (and should) expand the audience for humanities scholarship by making it more readily available online. Unless this public good can easily be found by the public —by readers outside the university— demand is certain to be underestimated and undersupplied....

These and other experiments in electronic publishing in the humanities and social sciences, and experiments in building and maintaining digital collections in libraries and institutional repositories, need to be supported as they move toward sustainability, and they need to be funded (by universities, by private foundations, and by the public) with the expectation that they will move toward open access —an area in which many of the natural sciences and some social sciences are conspicuously ahead of the humanities.  Open-source software is an instructive analogue here, and the experience in that community suggests, strongly, that one can build scalable and successful economic enterprises on the basis of free intellectual property. It is worth noting, too, that the “Economy of Regard” (that is, prestige) is one of the factors used to explain why this open economy works....

Open access is critical to constructing and deploying meaningful cyberinfrastructure, and it will be important for the humanities and social sciences to engage in active dialogue and then to lobby effectively concerning legislative and policy developments in this area —for example, in support of the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006. The Open Content Alliance offers one good platform for the dialogue the Commission wishes to promote....We encourage scholarly societies and university presses —currently unrepresented— to join the Alliance.

The Commission also strongly encourages the funders of research in the humanities and social sciences to require from applicants a plan for sharing and preserving data generated using grant funding, and we urge universities with commercial digitization partners to address long-term ownership and access issues when creating those partnerships. We also call on university counsels, boards of trustees, and provosts to provide aggressive support for the principles of fair use and open access, and to promote awareness and use of Creative Commons licenses. We call on senior academic leaders to ensure that their own practices (as producers of intellectual property and as editors of journals) and the practices of university presses, libraries, and museums support fair use and open access. And, finally, the Commission calls on scholarly societies and universities to advocate that Congress redress imbalances in intellectual property law that currently prevent or inhibit preservation, discourage scholarship, and restrain research and creativity.

Comment.  This is a superb report making exactly the right recommendations:  mandate OA, especially for publicly-funded research, lobby for it, support it within universities, support FRPAA, and join the OCA.  Universities that agree needn't wait for funding agencies or governments to act; they can mandate OA to their own research output right now.  Spread the word.

For background, see my blog posts on earlier drafts of the ACLS report.