On Open Humanities Press: A Panel Presentation by Members of the OHP Steering Group: The Session Blog on the Ensuing Question Period
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
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
University of Michigan Scholarly Publishing Office
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 13, 2009 Comments Off on On Open Humanities Press: A Panel Presentation by Members of the OHP Steering Group: The Session Blog on the Ensuing Question Period
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: The Session Blog
July 9, 9:30 AM – Fletcher Challenge Room 1900
Presenters:
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
Archived Video Stream of Session
Background
This session provided the library perspective as a follow up to the previous discussion on the Open Humanities Press (OHP) and its involvement with digital monographs, or “liquid books” (Hall). UCLA is working in partnership with the Open Humanities Press to fulfil a number of open access ideals, while the University of Michigan Library is working specifically to produce and distribute many of the works housed by the OHP online.
Session Overview
Marta Brunner at the PKP Conference (courtesy J. Miller)
Marta Brunner began the second half of the Open Humanities session by explaining her involvement with the online press. Originally she blogged the OHP and its endeavours prior to being contacted by one its founders, Sigi Jöttkandt, to be part of the body’s steering committee. Brunner has used her association with the OHP to bridge the dichotomous divide between research and library domains, which UCLA library has found to be an enormous asset.
“What future is UCLA library working to achieve?” Brunner asserted that this overarching question is the underlying motivation for the university’s work with the OHP. Furthermore, in light of the financial crisis and reduced budgets, open access issues are at a “watershed moment” where scholars and librarians will be working together to make more research freely available online. Brunner then outlined the library’s six fold vision, which ranges in order from most to least achievable:
1. UCLA seeks to be a flourishing hub of institutional repositories. While this is gaining ground many professors are still distrustful of online sources and perceive them to lack the same credibility as their print counterparts.
2. The library envisions itself as a curator of scholarly records. While this is considered a mandate for most university libraries, the “costs of migration” mean that “much content is overlooked” (Brunner).
3. UCLA hopes to disseminate an increasing amount of new digital media, which “enables semantically enhanced” (Brunner) products. The library has not been able to fulfil this goal on a large scale, but has created digital maps through the Hypercities project.
4. The library anticipates playing a greater role in providing open access content in classrooms. The UCLA library uses “a more liberal policy” (Brunner) towards content, which aligns neatly with the ideals of the OHP. One of the main benefits of this institutional leniency will be the increasing availability of cheaper text books spawned from more widely recognised open access scholarship.
5. The UCLA library hopes to be a paragon of a sustainable business model for housing and distributing open access content. Brunner used the comparison of the cost of a Toyota Corolla and the journal “Applied Polymer Science”: The periodical costs considerably more. Consequently, libraries will be facing economic crises as budgets are cut and journal costs stay high.
6. The most difficult goal to attain will be reducing to restrictive nature of academic tenure on open access scholarship. The generally perceived lack of authority of online sources continues to hinder the open access movement.
Shana Kimball at the PKP Conference (Courtesy J. Miller)
Shana Kimball began by posing a different question: “How do we scale a liquid book?” The University of Michigan Scholarly Publishing Office (SPO) seeks to provide an answer for this important query. Kimball outlined the role of the publishing branch of the library bOpen Humanities Press Panelefore explaining its core principles. The speaker then elaborated upon how these values guide the publisher’s work towards making research publications more cost effective, as well as elucidating on its partnership with the Open Humanities Press.
The University of Michigan publishing branch currently supports forty predominantly open access online journals, as well as a few print publications. The organisation also runs a “robust” reprint service for its online repositories and has published over 9000 titles on Amazon. Additionally, the SPO is working with the OHP to develop its online monograph (single subject books) endeavour as part of a pilot project whereby the university will “convert, host, provide access to, and archive” the series.
The University of Michigan Scholarly Publishing Office also operates with a set of six main beliefs to guide its aim of making scholarly publishing “more sustainable and scalable” (Kimball):
1. The SPO works at the peripheries of mainstream library services by providing copyright counsel in the copyright arena, cataloguing metadata, maintaining digital library functions and financing complicated transactions.
2. The SPO forms partnerships with other organisations to provide supplementary services, such as content sharing or publication conversions into digital forms amongst other enterprises.
3. The SPO believes strongly in protecting the rights of authors to use their own material as they see fit.
4. The SPO takes small, calculated risks that focus on perpetuating and promoting experimental texts, such as producing scholarly works within Comment Press that can be freely annotated.
5. The SPO provides a myriad of services that range from electronic publication to print on demand to content preservation.
6. The SPO is working cooperatively with the Open Humanities Press to extend its number of published series, as well as further enhance its reputation for high quality academic work. Authors will be able to choose to use a creative commons license while retaining copyright protection.
Ultimately, the SPO cannot attain the goal of supporting the OHP without creating partnerships with other bodies. Furthermore, the task of producing single monograph publications is a daunting one because the library / publisher relationship has been traditionally weak. Kimball concluded her presentation by welcoming interested parties to inquire about future collaborative endeavours and reaffirmed her organisation’s commitment to building the reputation of open access content, as well as being an agent of change in the advancement of the Open Humanities Press’ ideals.
Analysis
Both the UCLA Library and the University of Michigan Scholarly Publishing Office acknowledge to importance of the Open Humanities Press and seek to propagate its principles to the wider academic community. However, achieving change and gaining acknowledgment is proving to be difficult due to general academic distrust, high operational costs, a system of reputation based incentives that favour established scholars, as well as an overwhelming amount of content through which to sort. The goals of the OHP are laudable, but there needs to be an economic compromise between open dissemination of information at no cost to the consumer and providing profitable rewards to creators, researchers or artists in order to perpetuate the transmission of knowledge. The University of Michigan SPO appears to be negotiating this difficult dialectic by working with open access supporters, while charging for unique services and publishing traditional print journals, which is referred to as the mixed approach (Schmidt et al., 2005). The UCLA library, on the other hand, is focussing on reducing costs by embracing predominantly open access works. It will be interesting to see which institution offers the more sustainable business model and if other libraries will adopt these new paradigms. Moreover, it illustrates that the new open access ethos is having to coexist with traditional print resources until an alternative, yet effective, system of rewards can be established.
Related Links
University of Michigan Scholarly Publishing Office
References
Albert, K. M. (2006). Open access: implications for scholarly publishing and medical libraries. J Med Libr Assoc, 94 (3), Retrieved July 9, 2009, from http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=1525322&blobtype=pdf
Antelman, K. (2004). Do open-access articles have a greater research impact?. College & Research Libraries, September, Retrieved July 9, 2009, from http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/publications/crljournal/2004/sep/antelman.pdf
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 12, 2009 Comments Off on 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: The Session Blog
On Open Humanities Press: A Panel Presentation by Members of the OHP Steering Group: The Session Blog
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.
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.
July 9, 2009 2 Comments
