Happy Open Access Week — Slaw

"This year’s Open Access Week (Oct 22-28, 2012) offers much to celebrate, whether with Directory of Open Access Journals, surpassing 8,000 journals or ROARMAP now listing close to 250 open access mandates among universities, departments and institutes. The mega-journals, from Public Library of Science, with PLoS One, the Nature Publishing Group, with Scientific Reports, or the Royal Society, with Open Biology, link open access to the first new principle of digital scholarly communication, namely, that there is room in any given journal for all of its peer-reviewed-and-approved articles, and the world is richer by the appearance far sooner of a great many more articles in an open access format. Holdouts remain, however, and the concerns they raise are no less worth addressing than the gains made. For example, the American History Association, with 15,000 members, issued a statement on Scholarly Journal Publishing September 24, 2012 on that addresses the “debates over ‘open access’ to research” that speaks on behalf of the humanities generally. The AHA agrees that the current system 'contains elements of unfairness' but that these new moves toward open access, led by the sciences, 'generate new, and more difficult, dilemmas.' This may sound like opting for the-devil-you-know. Yet AHA is right. Change is more difficult than standing pat. But standing pat, in this case, means seeing the humanities miss out on an opening of their work that speaks to the public support and value of their work...  The AHA complains that its members’ would not have the same ability as grant-rich biomedical scientists have to pay the article processing fees that are driving innovations in open access publishing in the sciences, such as the mega journals. The discrepancy speaks to nothing less than current levels of public support and recognition for the humanities. Such support will not be helped by humanities scholars keeping their work – potentially as interesting to the public as the sciences – from being widely available to schools, Wikipedia, and interested readers, especially in the face of increasing access to the sciences.  The sticking point in all of this appears to be maintaining the prestigious and rigorous AHA flagship journal the American Historical Review published five times a year, which costs AHA $460,000 annually, and which rejects 91 percent of the articles it receives.  So as an Open Access Week exercise, let’s work with AHA, as an example of a humanities scholarly society feeling a little caught out in this new digital age of open scholarship. I believe that developments in open access over the last decade speak to a number of possible steps that a humanities scholarly association should at least consider in thinking about the best interests of its members and the circulation of their scholarship as a public good ..."