July 9, 11:00 AM – Fletcher Challenge Room 1900

Panellists

Barbara Cohen, Director of Humanitech, University of California, Irvine.  Steering Group, The Open Humanities Press.

Gary Hall, Professor, Media and Performing Arts, Coventry University, UK.  Co-founder of The Open Humanities Press.

Marta Brunner, Librarian for English and American Literature and Comparative Literature at the Charles E. Young Research Library at UCLA

Shana Kimball, Publications Manager in the Scholarly Publishing Office (SPO) at the University of Michigan Library

Session Abstract (Not Applicable)

Logo (source)

Background

This question period followed a series of presentations related to the Open Humanities Press and two libraries that are supporting their new endeavours of producing single monograph titles. The questions from the audience have been quoted as exactly as possible with the condensed responses from the panel provided underneath.

Relevant Sessions

Part 1 – On Open Humanities Press: A Panel Presentation by Members of the OHP Steering Group

Part 2 –  On Library Publishing and the Open Humanities Press: A Panel Presentation by the UCLA Library and the University of Michigan Library’s Scholarly Publishing Office

Session Overview

Question 1: How is the OHP dealing with the lack of representations of many cultures and the issue of concentration of media control, such as Thomson Scientific?

Hall replied that he has “huge problems with Thomson Scientific” because all journals have to be registered with them. Younger, less established researchers, or those who are marginalised, cannot publish due to the prohibitive cost. The high price for translating work into English is also impeding academics of other cultures from gaining their due recognition.

Question 2: How do you establish accreditation when the OHP is creating decentralising and destabilising force? Furthermore, if we are in a stage of transition how do we reassure our scholars about the credibility and reliability of open access journals?

Cohen lead the response of the panellists by asserting that we that we have to cope in times of change. We are still retaining some traditions as we move forward, which Bolter refers to as remediation when one media uses the prestige of another to gain credibility (Bolter, 2001). Cohen further asserts that the goal of OHP was to match print quality online: Now it is to surpass it. Kimball then added that experimental works, such as the liquid novel, provided authors with a wider range of options, which benefits everyone. Brunner contended that we need to enthusiastically embrace these trends in order to ensure innovation. Hall argued that the Press is conscious of forging ahead, but that “it also needs to bring people along with it”. Hall stated that there is a tension that exists between being innovative and reassuring scholars that online journals are credible, authoritative sources.

Question 3: How do we give credit and attribution to original authors? How is the author being redefined?

Hall answered that Wikis are collaborative, but there is software that can track input. Hall is actually disappointed in this scenario given that this is a regression of sorts to old traditional authorship. Academics are becoming increasingly involved in open access because it leads to greater prestige for authorship, but again this aligns with old customs that don’t suit the goals of new media.

Question 4: What are the business models for open access monographs? Is grant money part of this equation?

Cohen agreed that grants are important and that as the OHP moves to the monograph series they will be made available. Kimball answered that Michigan State is exploring new revenue streams, but they are operating on the traditional model of rewarding authorship. Hall added that authors are now paying in many cases. Kimball clarified that new alternatives, such as teaching relief, are needed to be offered to reward “gifts of labour” in this new era. Another idea would be to create graduate fellowships or scholarships to do valuable research assistant work. This would work well in libraries because many unknown collections still haven’t been processed. Hall suggested that we “could shift the library model” so that each one publishes its own work and then freely shares it. He concluded that there is no easy access.

Question 5: What are liquid books?

Hall re-established that liquid books are actually referring back to their original status as conglomerations of knowledge. A liquid is fluid and constantly moving, which is why it is an appropriate description for what books really are.

Analysis

The seminal question during this period exposed the issue of how the OHP has to negotiate the contradictory pressures to succumb to traditional models of academic endorsement in order to gain credibility, as well as to provide a vehicle for innovation, originality and modernisation. Furthermore, a press such as the OHP needs to have a business model in order to cover the costs accrued, which is anathema to the ideals of open access proponents. This tension between open and restricted access, or market oriented and non-profit motives, are creating a dialectic series of synthesises that will eventually lead to the pervasiveness of open access content (Schmidt et al., 2005); however, these changes will likely need to retain some features of the old models in order to maintain legitimacy.

Related Links

Liquid Books

Human Tech (Barbara Cohen)

University of Michigan Scholarly Publishing Office

Open Humanities Press

Gary Hall Discusses His Philosophy with regards to Online Content

References

Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Schmidt, K. D., Sennyey, P., & Carstens, T. V. (2005). New roles for a changing environment: Implications of open access for libraries. College & Research Libraries, September, Retrieved July 9, 2009, from http://paws.wcu.edu/kschmidt/publications/CandRL.pdf

July 9, 9:30AM – Fletcher Challenge Room 1900

Presenters

Barbara Cohen, Director of Humanitech, University of California, Irvine.  Steering Group, The Open Humanities Press.

Gary Hall, Professor, Media and Performing Arts, Coventry University, UK.  Co-founder of The Open Humanities Press.

Session Abstract

Archived video stream of session

Background

Launched in May, 2008, The Open Humanities Press (OHP) is a scholar -led open access publishing initiative that currently publishes 10 journals.  Central to OHP’s vision are goals articulated by the Budapest Open Access declaration (2002) to remove barriers to scholarly literature, accelerate research, enrich education and share the learning of the rich world with the poor.

Session Overview

Photo: J. Miller - PKP Conference

Barbara Cohen started the session with what she called “Open Access 101”, a quick survey of some basic principles and recent initiatives focused on ideas of giving free and open access to peer-reviewed scholarly literature on the Internet.   This background is important context to consider in relation to the principles and goals driving The Open Humanities Press (OHP), an open access publishing house that launched in 2008 with 7 journals (now 10).  Central to OHP’s vision are goals articulated by the Budapest Open Access declaration (2002) to remove barriers to scholarly literature, accelerate research, enrich education and share the learning of the rich world with the poor.  Cohen went on to note that despite the fact that most scholars prefer to read electronic copies of articles, the Internet is still perceived by many Humanties scholars as being an unsuitable publishing medium for serious humanities research.  In a 2008 talk at Irvine, Sigi Jӧttkandt, one of the co-founders of the OHP, characterized this perception where the Internet was seen as “a sort of open free-for-all of publishing” medium in stark contrast to trusted, peer-reviewed paper-based scholarly journals.  The OHP was envisioned as a means to overcome this perception by bringing high-quality editorial standards and design processes to the field of Humanities scholarly publishing on the Internet.  It was essential for the founders of the OHP that scholars felt that its journals would be good places to publish.  The founders of the OHP feel that their stragegy of developing an open access publishing house has been a good way to gain the trust of the scholarly community in the humanities.

Cohen described OHP’s key goals as: advocating Open Access in the Humanities; fostering a community of prestigious Humanities scholars; promoting intellectual diversity, and exploring new forms of scholarly collaboration.  A strong peer review model was seen to be key to the success of the OHP in developing a level of creditability and trust amongst Humanist scholars, and to that end, the OHP has gathered a prestigious, rotating editorial board, as well as a strong steering group, all without any operating budget.  The OHP also has worked to bring  open access content to its readers in journals that share high production values and effective leveraging of new technologies such as PKP’s Open Journals System and, in the future PKP’s Open Manuscript Press software.

Gary Hall

Photo: J. Miller - PKP Conference

The second speaker, Gary Hall, picked up the importance of open access initiatives with books and monographs.  Such initiatives were particularly significant in the Humanities because scholars in these disciplines place such emphasis on books over journal articles.   Hall discussed several book projects that are underway with The OHP, describing these efforts as focused upon a new cultural studies project, liquid books with a fluid structure up to the challenge of exploring the potential shape of the book to come.  The first of these books has been published as New Cultural Studies: The Liquid Theory Reader.  Hall was particularly interested in the potential of experimental projects that would allow scholars to challenge traditional concepts of the codex by expanding to include the range of materials/media found within printed books: excerpts, snippets of media, clips from multimodal texts.  Such an exploration is an important response to the emerging landscape for digital texts, a landscape influenced by the proliferation of books scanned by Google and reading devices from ipods to Kindles.

Hall also indicated his interest in creative ways to employ open access and open editing strategies in liquid books that were free for anyone to read, write, remix, and reinvent to produce alternate parallel versions of books.  Such acts of distributed writing and editing within liquid texts would, Hall hoped, raise critical challenges to traditional notions of authorship, intellectual property, authority, etc.  This potential dismantling of the authority of the text was a particular challenge for open access initiatives, as they ran the risk of reinscribing and reproducing traditional approaches and limits of current knowledge production, this time in an electronic space. Drawing upon Derrida, Foucault and Barthes, Hall offered that open access could bring interrogations of academic authorship so as to loosen up these notions, making them less fixed and rigid (more jello-like).  By recognizing some wobbles in the smooth surface of academic publishing, scholars would be in a good position to delineate and respond to shifts in power and authority increasingly evident in decentralized forms of writing such as MyTimes (a cross between the associated press and an RSS reader), Wikipedia (a networked, distributed and very liquid work), and other such fluid sites for knowledge production.   Such a redistribution and decentring of traditional authority could help scholars to avoid replicating the current centre/periphery dynamics of knowledge production and dissemination, an imbalance that sees 90% of the world’s scientific research being published by just 15 countries.

Question Period

During the question period, one member of the audience identified a contradictory tension that seemed evident in the presentations offered in the session.  On the one hand, the speakers stressed a need to establish the credibility of academic publishing.  On the other hand, it was clear that there was also a keen interest in exploring the boundaries of new media (and traditional academic practice) so as to destabilize the model of academic publishing alongside the decentring of other concepts like authority (authorship), and the very form of scholarly writing be it journal articles or monographs.  Keeping these things in balance is quite a challenge, especially when many scholars are as intent on building credibility in these new forms of academic scholarship at the same time as others are intent on destabilizing the very units and processes that have long characterized academic discourse.  This somewhat anxious tension seems to describe aptly the stance of Humanist scholars exploring new cultural studies.

Related Links

The Open Humanities Press – Website for The Open Humanities Press, with links to their current journals: Cosmos and History, Culture Machine, Fast Capitalism, Fibreculture, Film-Philosophy, Image and Narrative, International Journal of Žižek Studies, Parrhesia, Postcolonial Text, Vectors.

Hall, G. (2008). Digitize This Book!: The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press).

Jӧttkandt, S. (2008). Free Libre Scholarship: The Open Humanities Press. Irvine, 3 April, 2008.

Jӧttkandt, S. and Hall, G. (2007).  Beyond Impact: OA in the Humanities.  Brussels, 13 February, 2007.

King, J., Lynch, C, Willinsky, J. (2009) Open Access in the Humanities. Podcast.  University of California, Irvine.