Gary Hall, Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now, a new book on OA just released by the University of Minnesota Press. Hall is a professor of media and performing arts at Coventry University, a founding co-editor of the peer-reviewed OA journal, Culture Machine, director of the OA Cultural Studies e-Archive, CSeARCH, and co-founder of the Open Humanities Press. Here's the blurb from the book's home page:
How open access can transform academia for the better.
In the sciences, the merits and ramifications of open access —the electronic publishing model that gives readers free, irrevocable, worldwide, and perpetual access to research— have been vigorously debated. Open access is now increasingly proposed as a valid means of both disseminating knowledge and career advancement. In Digitize This Book! Gary Hall presents a timely and ambitious polemic on the potential that open access publishing has to transform both “papercentric” humanities scholarship and the institution of the university itself.
Hall, a pioneer in open access publishing in the humanities, explores the new possibilities that digital media have for creatively and productively blurring the boundaries that separate not just disciplinary fields but also authors from readers. Hall focuses specifically on how open access publishing and archiving can revitalize the field of cultural studies by making it easier to rethink academia and its institutions. At the same time, by unsettling the processes and categories of scholarship, open access raises broader questions about the role of the university as a whole, forcefully challenging both its established identity as an elite ivory tower and its more recent reinvention under the tenets of neoliberalism as knowledge factory and profit center.
Rigorously interrogating the intellectual, political, and ethical implications of open access, Digitize This Book! is a radical call for democratizing access to knowledge and transforming the structures of academic and institutional authority and legitimacy.
Comments
I haven't had a chance to look at it, but it appears to be the first book on OA to focus on the humanities and the role of universities in the sharing of knowledge. Congratulations, Gary.
Also see yesterday's announcement for endorsements by Kembrew McLeod and Jonathan Culler, and the OAN blog post from July 2008 when the book was first announced.
Apparently the book doesn't have an OA edition.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/26/2008 12:26:00 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.
