On September 26, 2006, the American Philological Association (APA) and the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) issued a joint statement on electronic publishing. (Thanks to Ross Scaife for alerts to this and the documents below.)
The statement didn't mention OA, but the draft Issues and Recommendations for Discussion (October 20, 2006) discussed the problem of OA in the humanities in good detail --but for the false assumption that "most" OA journals charge author-side fees (in fact, most charge no fees). It recommend a study of the extent to which American classicists lack access to American classics journals. It also recommended OA archiving and the launch of new OA archives. The two organizations called for a period of public comments, which ended on December 20.
[O]ne way to improve working conditions and research opportunities for university and college teachers is to support, in every possible way and with as much energy as we can muster, the creation of massive digital libraries based on open access such as those now being built by Google, Microsoft, the Open Content Alliance and others. Even if only partially realized, these efforts will expand the intellectual reach of all college and university teachers. If these efforts come close to their original goals, we will find online and freely accessible a larger and far more useful research library than any institution of higher learning has ever created. Classicists stand to gain more than any other discipline, for the field is often strongest at liberal arts colleges which have never had access to first class research environments. Nor is open access alone always enough. After sustained requests from an increasing set of researchers, we at Perseus decided to make all the content that we could available under a Creative Commons attribution/sharealike/non-commercial license. Researchers want to apply their own analytical tools to the full source texts and to create derivative works....
Saving money is a good way to go bankrupt. The strategic challenge that classics faces as a field is to maintain and expand its role in the broader intellectual life of society. Our situation is much closer to that of a university competing with other universities than it is to Hollywood or the music industry raising capital from mass market sales....
The APA reports 3,195 members.21 In our last survey of users (April 2005), 400,000 unique users consulted the Perseus Digital Library, 90% of whom were working with classical materials....
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.
