Scholars in the sciences have been light-years ahead of their peers in the humanities in exploring the possibilities of open-access publishing. But a new venture with prominent academic backers, the Open Humanities Press, wants to help humanists close the gap.
The nonprofit operation—described by those involved as “an international open-access publishing collective"—makes its official debut on Monday with a roster of seven already-established journals in critical and cultural studies and related fields: Cosmos and History, Culture Machine, Fibreculture, Film-Philosophy, International Journal of Zizek Studies, Parrhesia, and Vectors. Each journal already publishes in an open-access format, and each will retain full editorial independence. The press will provide editorial and technical-development services, using the Open Journal Systems software created by the Public Knowledge Project, and it will help with distribution and promotion.
The press has assembled a star-studded lineup of literary critics and theorists as its editorial advisory board. The panel includes Alan Badiou, professor of philosophy emeritus at France’s École Normale Supérieure; Jonathan Culler, professor of English and comparative literature at Cornell University; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, professor in the humanities at Columbia University; and J. Hillis Miller, professor of English at the University of California at Irvine.
Another member is Stephen Greenblatt, professor of the humanities at Harvard University. In 2002, as president of the Modern Language Association, Mr. Greenblatt issued a rallying cry to humanists about the crisis in traditional scholarly publishing.
Humanists “need to ask ourselves where things are going in the future,” said Mr. Greenblatt in an interview. “This is a responsible and serious way of thinking that through.”
Peter Suber, a research professor of philosophy at Earlham College and a well-known advocate of open-access scholarship, also sits on the press’s board. “It’s badly needed, and it’s among the first,” he said of the venture. He hopes that Open Humanities will overcome the lingering perception among some humanists that open access means a shoddy product.
“Scholars in all disciplines tend to confuse online publication with the bypassing of peer review,” Mr. Suber observed. “That’s simply mistaken.” In the humanities in particular, he said, “we’re fighting the prestige of print.”
Fear of Coding?
David Ottina, one of the press’s founders, describes its mission as one of empowerment. “We’re trying to get people past those hurdles that prevent them from taking advantage of the Internet for scholarly communication,” he said.
Humanities scholars don’t generally start journals just because they like to write computer code. Open Humanities Press hopes to use its technological savvy to free up journal editors’ time while improving the presentation of editorial content and making it more easily accessed and archived.
“The journals are mostly homegrown Web sites at this point,” said Mr. Ottina. “We help them move over to a more solid technical infrastructure to facilitate things like indexing.” The press also will provide help with design and other, more aesthetic concerns.
Mr. Ottina is the only one of the four founders without an academic affiliation; he is a Web specialist based in Brussels. The other founders include Paul Ashton, the co-editor of Cosmos and History, who teaches at Victoria University, in Australia; Gary Hall, a professor of media and performance at Coventry University, in Britain; and Sigi Jöttkandt, a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academy, an academic think tank subsidized by the Dutch government. The idea for Open Humanities Press was born in 2005 when the founders began talking about open-access challenges in the humanities at a conference at Ghent University.
To begin with, the press will have no operating budget and no formal staff. Internet hosting is being provided gratis by ibiblio, a sort of Internet library—or “conservancy,” as they call it—based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The founders will draw on their professional networks, and those of the journals, to get things done in the near term.
Those involved with Open Humanities Press hope to expand beyond critical theory, perhaps even beyond journals and into open-access monographs, once the enterprise has a reputation for what Mr. Ottina called “rigorous academic quality.”
“Ultimately,” he said, “the goal is to get as much academic content into an open-access distribution model as possible.”