Do ‘the Risky Thing’ for Open Access » Roger T. Whitson, Ph.D

"A little over a year ago, Kathleen Fitzpatrick wrote 'Do ‘the Risky Thing’ in Digital Humanities,' in which she recounted a graduate student who asked about whether she should do a digital project for her dissertation or something more conservative. Fitzpatrick responded 'Do the risky thing,' but qualified it with '[m]ake sure that someone’s got your back, but do the risky thing.' Towards the middle of the argument, Fitzpatrick notes how a huge mentoring problem is emerging for younger scholars who are being hired as digital humanists. These scholars are yet not receiving adequate support for a kind of scholarship that many campuses may not know how to support. 'Too many young digital humanists find themselves cautioned away from the very work that got them hired by well-meaning senior colleagues, who now tell them that wacky digital projects are fine on the side, or once the work necessary for tenure is complete. In giving that advice, we run the risk of breaking the innovative spirit that we’ve hoped to bring to our departments. And where that spirit isn’t broken, untenured digital scholars run the risk of burnout from having to produce twice as much—traditional scholarship and digital projects—as their counterparts do.'  I bring up Fitzpatrick’s argument because I believe this kind of advice applies equally well to open access publishing. Last night, David Parry gave a provocative and fiery talk about open access and knowledge cartels at Washington State University...  Parry argued that all publishers who publish underneath a paywall represent a knowledge cartel: something that makes money not by producing new value, but by limiting access to information...  Parry said that we should not only refuse to write for closed access journals, we should refuse to sit on their peer review boards, and (furthermore) we should stop reading them. When asked about why young scholars would risk tenure for open access publishing, his response was less satisfying. 'If you have to sell your soul to get tenure,” he says “then maybe tenure isn’t worth having.'  I think that’s the wrong kind of argument to make, despite the fact that Parry is up for tenure this year and has been quite consistent about publishing open access. Tim Morton has written about what he calls 'beautiful soul syndrome' ... Instead of purifying ourselves, Morton suggests that we all realize that 'we are hopelessly entangled in the mesh of interconnectedness, without any possibility of extricating ourselves.'  I don’t believe that open access is an all-or-nothing scenario ... Further, I think the path to more younger scholars publishing open access is not appealing to their guilt or giving them a beautiful soul to measure themselves by. What we need, rather, is a series of experiments, people willing to take risks, and faculty and administration members willing to back them..."