Open access for critical and cultural theory: Open Humanities Press

Ed.: I’m pleased to welcome our next guest blogger, Dr. Sigi Jöttkandt. Dr. Jöttkandt is a researcher in the theory department of the Jan van Eyck Academy in the Netherlands where she co-edits S, the open access journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique. She is also a co-founder of the Open Humanities Press, a new open access publishing collective in critical theory launching this spring.

Opinions are solely those of the author.

I was really excited to discover Open Students and to see how student activists are taking up the cause of OA. This is a very heartening sign because it means there’s real potential now for long-lasting and deep-seated changes to take place in academic publishing and scholarly communication more generally.

I asked Gavin if I could do this guest blog, however, because I’m a little worried that students in the humanities might feel a bit left out from the OA debate, which has been largely dominated up till now by the sciences. I want to emphasize how OA has enormous implications for us, too, in that it currently represents the simplest and most obvious solution to the crisis in monograph publishing that is causing an insidious contraction in our fields, and is hitting younger academics particularly hard.

The real question is why humanities academics are not taking to the opportunities represented by OA in the same way as academics in the sciences. From speaking with colleagues, my sense is that free online publishing continues to have some way to go before it is fully accepted by our peers as a credible, let alone a desirable and prestigious, medium for one’s work. There’s still a lot of FUD among us: fear, uncertainty and doubt about the changes represented by new technologies, including whether online publications will count towards job offers or tenure, or even if OA journals will still be around and available on the web after a few years. These are important issues and they need to be seriously addressed before OA - both “Gold” (publishing in OA journals) and “Green” (archiving in OA repositories, which confronts its own set of issues in the humanities) - can really be adopted by the mainstream.

This is why Gary Hall, David Ottina, Paul Ashton and I - OA advocates and journal editors - founded Open Humanities Press (OHP) last year. This open access publishing initiative is intended to offer humanities academics assurances that the OA journals affiliated with OHP meet the strictest standards of academic publishing, scholarship and archiving. These issues are typically overseen by a publishing house and this is also the role OHP is intended to play: OHP journals are not only all peer-reviewed, they also go through a rigorous external certification process by OHP’s independent editorial board whose policies are clearly laid out and available on the OHP website.

The other idea behind forming OHP was that it would enable us to pool our individual resources. As a publishing collective, we can provide each other with technical help, coordinate a permanent archiving strategy for our journals, and share graphic design skills in an effort to bring all the journals - and eventually we hope, also OA monographs - up to the visual and technical standards humanities academics expect of prestigious professional publications. We believe this will have a positive impact on how OA journals are perceived by our communities. We’re hopeful it will also help build greater trust in free, peer-reviewed online scholarship in all disciplines by showing that there is nothing inherent about the digital medium that means publications cannot be peer-reviewed and have the high editorial standards of comparable print publications.

Currently lots of exciting independent initiatives are springing up in and around the digital humanities and its implications for rethinking scholarship and the university (e.g. Media Commons, Voice of the Shuttle, NINES, The Digital Arts and Humanities of the UK Arts and Humanities Council, alt.x, The Imaginary Border Academy, The EduFactory, The Experimental University, along with the new discursive networks proposed by the Institute for Critical Climate Change to name just a few). Part of what we’re hoping OHP will do is enable these groups to find one another and lend different voices to the OA debate with the unique perspectives that come from the specific questions and theoretical approaches of humanities disciplines.

Open Students is a clear demonstration that students already “get” the way OA enables us to do more rigorous research when we have access to all the relevant materials, not just those which our library and interlibrary loan budgets can afford to purchase. What’s been interesting to discover is that some of the strongest OA advocates in the humanities are leading senior figures like J. Hillis Miller, Jonathan Culler and Stephen Greenblatt (all of whom are generously sharing their expertise on OHP’s advisory board). It suggests that what we really need now is to make overtures towards mid-career academics, many of whom have yet to fully understand what Open Access means. As OA journal editors, we are working to raise awareness and trust in OA publishing among these scholars but we would also love to hear ideas from students about how we can work together. As with many of the cultural shifts in recent history, it is students who are on the front-lines of this transformative change too.

OHP will be launching in Spring 2008 with 7 of the leading OA journals in critical and cultural theory. Gary Hall and I will be speaking at HumaniTech at UC Irvine, and at UC Santa Barbara in early April about the project. We’d love to see some of you there. But of course if you can’t make it, we would be very interested to hear your ideas, strategies, comments, suggestions, etc. either here or by contacting us at info [at] openhumanitiespress.org