Guest Post: Karin Wulf on Open Access and Historical Scholarship | The Scholarly Kitchen

"As a regular reader of The Scholarly Kitchen, I was delighted to meet Rick Anderson at the annual conference of the American Historical Association earlier this year. I was startled, however, by Rick’s description of the hostility towards open access (OA) that he perceived in the conversations he witnessed there — conversations that, as he put it, ‘(used) the kind of language to describe OA advocates that I’m used to hearing OA advocates use to describe commercial publishers’ ... I want to be clear: historians definitely aren’t hostile to access, or even necessarily to open access. In my experience, however, and certainly this is the case for the Institute I direct and the journal we publish, the William and Mary Quarterly, many historians are beginning to look more critically at the problems that open access proposes to solve, the monolithic solutions that are offered, and the potential consequences for scholars and their scholarship. What we find is troubling, even while there is tremendous enthusiasm among historians, as there has been for decades, for seeking ways to disseminate historical scholarship more widely ... But we also now have ample evidence of the great divide between the circumstances in STEM publishing that have resulted in the emergence of OA policies and mandates from funders, governments, and universities and the realities of humanities and social sciences (HSS) scholarly publishing ... There needs to be more and regular attention to the importance of heterogeneous models of access, dissemination, and production. Scholarship is developed in very different ways, within very distinctive research and publication ecosystems. No one would suggest that biologists and film scholars organize, finance, and undertake their research along similar lines. And we know very well that the resulting scholarship is not consumed in the same way. Why, then, should we assume that the results of that research–published scholarship—can be produced and disseminated in the same way? Especially when analyses now suggest that this is an unlikely—perhaps even undesirable—outcome.  It worries me deeply that most conversations flatten out these differences, and that few mention, let alone prioritize, the importance of the scholarship itself. Financing circulation is obviously important, but creating scholarship is a more complex and collaborative process than OA advocates and policies recognize or accommodate, involving many layers of skill and labor. I’m going to confine my remarks in this post to the way that humanities scholarship, and more specifically scholarship within my own discipline of history, is developed and produced within scholarly journals ..."