Response to Ed: Does the New System Work for the Humanities?
By Stan KatzI think that the New System described by Ed is increasingly the mode of communication in the science-oriented sector of academic creativity. It makes perfect sense, and is the logical successor to the use of the pre-print format in the analog era. But it is, for better or worse, not so obvious in the humanities context (and I would guess this applies to the softer of the social sciences as well). It is partly that portions of the humanities are a book-dominated culture rather than an article culture — and the New System is especially well-suited to the article format. But it is also that there is a tradition of individualism, privatism and secrecy in humanities scholarship. This is in part because the data are frequently not public, and it is in fact the “discovery of the data” that constitute an important part of the claim to creativity and originality in the humanities. The result is that scholars, especially young scholars, fear (with some reason) the appropriation of their data/ideas and rely upon publication to confirm their claim to their ideas. It was not so long ago that humanities (and social science) journals would not accept article submissions that had already been posted — Paul DiMaggio and I found that grad students would not allow us to post their working papers for our Center, for fear that they could not be “published” subsequently. That has changed and is changing, but we have a long way to go.So my guess is that in the humanities (and soft social sciences) the initial challenge is cultural, not technological. The New System is clearly logically as well as technologically preferable, but it may not yet “work” for the humanities culture.
October 17th, 2007 at 7:15 pm
Different disciplines may be moving towards openness in different ways, each reflecting its own culture and history.
There are some areas of humanities that are pioneering in openness, such as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/, the efforts to digitize and make openly available primary source materials so important to historical research, and development of open searching of textual materials.
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists a hundred journals in history, and 107 in Languages and Literature, to name a couple of areas in humanities.
Social sciences covers a lot of territory - there are hundreds of fully open access, peer reviewed journals in the social sciences - for a list, go to the DOAJ Social Sciences page at: http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=subject&cpid=87
Here are the DOAJ numbers for specific social sciences for today:
Anthropology (43 journals)
Education (204 journals)
Ethnology (12 journals)
Gender Studies (21 journals)
Library and Information Science (78 journals)
Media and communication (39 journals)
Psychology (73 journals)
Social Sciences (124 journals)
Sociology (60 journals)
Sports Science (6 journals)
Different social sciences are likely moving to open access at different speeds. In Library and Information Science, the percentage of journals that are already open access is a substantial portion of the total, and perhaps more important, almost all new start-up journals are open access.
October 18th, 2007 at 9:27 am
Don’t forget about SSRN.
October 18th, 2007 at 11:18 am
Heather makes an excellent point. There is a rapidly increasing and rich digital humanities literature, though a lot of it is still proprietary. So one problem is Peter’s — that of the need for more open access. But the other, and the one I am particularly concerned with, is that much of this digital material is really part of the Old System — it is the digital version of the Old System. Too little is part of the New System. When I became president of ACLS we had 60 learned societies in the humanities and social sciences, and in my first address to them I said that they needed to start immediately producing their journals digitally — none did in 1986, when I spoke to them. Now most of those journals are digital and networked (and quite a few are open access, but many are not). But they are mostly Old System in that they are digitized text. They are not interactive, they do not use image or sound to any great degree, and they are formatted in Old Style (articles are published quarterly, for instance, rather than posted as available). There is little truly digital scholarship. So for the humanities in particular, the potential intellectual and scholarly advantage is huge, but it is as yet largely unrealized. And we in the field have just lost our most creative entreprenuer, Roy Rosenzweig of George Mason University, who passed away last week.
October 21st, 2007 at 12:22 pm
Stan (who, by the way, as head of the ACLS brought together librarians, publishers, and scholars in two of the most successful conferences on scholarly communication ever held, in the late 1990s) is right on target in his reply to Heather. And I would add that there is a lesson to learn from the recent decision by the American Anthropological Association to move its AnthroSource collection to Wiley/Blackwell from the University of California Press. As Ed noted earlier, the commercial sector always seems to be a step ahead of universities in being able to provide the most sophisticated technological platforms for the editorial management and publishing of journals (not least because they have a lot more capital at their disposal). Thus, unless Stefan’s mandated Green OA proposal works, we are likely to see more of the society-sponsored and university-based journal literature migrate out to the commercial sector, which means that the STM crisis will remain with us for some time to come. And it could get worse: if universities do not support their presses sufficiently to develop the sophisticated publishing systems for electronic monograph publishing, too, it may follow the same path, re-creating for monographs the same outsourcing problem that universities allowed to happen in the wake of World War II in the STM journal sector. But things get complicated here: if the mandated Green OA system works and is applied to the humanities, too, we could lose Project Muse, so far the one truly successful effort by universities to maintain a presence in the arena of aggregate e-journal distribution. One final point to pick up on Stan’s (which echoes the Ithaka Report’s observation that we have made the transition to the first stage of the evolution of the system but not yet the second): our experience so far with the development of systems to produce works that truly take full advantage of the technology to create works with no exact counterpart in the print world, like the ACLS Humanities E-Book Project and Gutenberg-e, do not augur well for their self-sustainability into the future. Heather’s mention of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is the exception that proves the rule. This will end up being sustainable once the endowment has been raised to put it on a permanent basis. Peter notes that there are a lot of no-fee OA journals. Can we really expect them all to run on the basis of permanent endowments? As one who is engaged now in trying to build an endowment for our press, I suspect that it is wildly unrealistic to think that such permanent funding schemes can be developed for all the thousands of journals (not to mention monograph series) that aspire to survive without charging their readers for their use.