Book Review: Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future by Martin Eve | LSE Review of Books

" ... Martin Eve’s Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future does an admirable job of unpacking and analysing arguments and evidence on both sides of the open access debate, re-examining these in relation to a rich and nuanced picture of the complex dynamics and political economics of scholarly communication which he builds up over the course of the text. The book itself will be published on 18th November 2014 as one of the first open access monographs from Cambridge University Press, after the successful launch of Jo Guldi and David Armitage’s The History Manifesto earlier this year. The five chapters of the book are dedicated, respectively, to introducing open access in the humanities; the economics and labour of open access; rights and licensing; the challenges and developments around open access to monographs; and a survey of the kinds of innovations that open access both enables now, and which it might enable in the future. The book puts advocates and critics of open access into a kind of productive dialogue, serving to recognise and address concerns and critiques in their strongest form, and challenging advocates to strengthen their case by taking some of these reservations more seriously than they sometimes do ..."