A Brief History of History Responding to Open Access - The Scholarly Kitchen

This post is co-authored by Karin Wulf and Seth Denbo, Director of Scholarly Communication and Digital Initiatives for the American Historical Association In a Scholarly Kitchen post earlier this week, Lisa Hinchliffe summarized some basic themes in the thousands of pages of responses to Plan S. One of her six themes was the STEM-centric features of Plan S, and the problems it poses for humanists. We wanted to explore this in greater detail, historians that we are, by looking to the recent history of the historical discipline’s engagement with open access (OA) policies. Of course this doesn’t represent the view of all historians, who may have diverging individual perspectives. We take a close look at some of the themes that have been sounded by disciplinary organizations over the past decade, both to offer our colleagues in scholarly communications who are thinking about the features and implications of Plan S some greater insight, but also to offer colleagues in history a purchase on what might seem like abstract, distant or irrelevant debates.